cwmoonglum

[cwmoonglum]

Breath Deeply

It was hard to think these days, A thought, and giggled to himself. The sound was so uncommon he felt his stomach contort in disgust, as if laughter were a parasite wriggling past his cracked lips. But what was it he had just been thinking? When he checked the tablet strung around his neck, he saw for the fourth time that day that he had already exhausted his rationing in the oxygen chamber. Maybe he could... but he was hungry, and cold and his hands were so very interesting, how they moved. He drew a shuddering breath to try and focus, and it became a low wheeze, then a mewling sob. He missed his mother. The tablet blinked red; take shelter, another storm tonight.

Beebee made microwave food that evening. They piled together like the hamsters A had forgotten to feed in primary school. The hamsters his classmates had eaten, so loathe to waste. With no jobs A and Beebee made do with their state heating allowance and a quilt Beebee had sewn over the course of one long summer before her hair had turned grey. When they could both remember things, and had felt young and useful. Beebee had been beautiful, more beautiful than A thought he deserved, and smart, which only the clean faces on TV were now. She had been so smart she was a teacher, A thought. His eyes were wet again as Beebee rocked them both to sleep.

The next day A got up early and went to buy milk for their cat, Tiger. Only when he had bought the milk did A remember that Tiger had died last year. A did not know what to do with the milk, which Beebee would not want. Standing in the market square he began to feel awfully tired, and sat down by the pond to think. He poured the milk into the pond so that Beebee would not remember Tiger and be sad again.

The white milk made wonderful clouds in the green water, and others came to watch. A felt happy when he saw them smile, until a man his own age asked 'what does it mean?' and he did not know what to say. After a while, a tall policeman in his breathing mask came along and scared the crowd away by waving his baton. A felt he should apologise for causing trouble, but a woman cried and snarled at the policeman. Some people get very angry these days, A thought, it is so hard to feel ok. The woman snatched at the policeman's baton and spat on him, only to be pushed into the pond. She hit her head on the edge of the bubbling pump in the pond and her red blood mixed with the green and white clouds that her limp form floated in. 'That's what you get,' said the policeman, waving his baton at the others, 'that's what you get.'

A walked home as briskly as he could; he couldn't breath deeply enough to run, and he was saving his ration that day to talk to Beebee. Lately they had been meeting together in a dim corner of the oxygen room and doing their best to pretend they were alone. Together they could remember nearly everything, and it gave A such joy to see the deep lines in Beebee's face pulled up by her smile. The policeman would not follow him, he thought, but it was okay to be afraid because things are scary. When he got home he would like to cuddle Tiger.

[cwmoonglum]

Thirsty fird, dissolute; so much for truffle hunting hogs, snuffling at roots red and raw. It's raining, damp and the leaves are growing greener in the grey gloom. Everything washes clean, into the underground stream and out to sea.

[cwmoonglum]

The Dump

The noise began some time in the months which used to be Spring, when we learned that time was a part of the climate. Younger people would look askance if you remarked how things should be getting warmer. Insurers worked overtime through the new flood season. Undertakers too, less for the new burials and more to ensure the long dead stayed where they were. A Victorian widow washed up in the high street, rattling on the windows of the Citizen's Advice.

With all this going on, no one could put a precise date on the noise, which seemed at most a mild irritant next to the revenant ladies and economy collapsing like soggy cardboard. A few more sensitive types reported insomnia, a soreness of the eyes and teeth. The university sent out an engineer to investigate, but her equipment was mishandled by the courier and the project abandoned. Some weeks later, the noise underwent a pubertal deepening, shifting pitch from an astringent whine and becoming, for the first time, easily located.

It proceeded from the dump, where compacted decades of electronics had begun to chatter to each other. The Bakelite telephone from the bank which refused your grandfather a mortgage. The busted smile of a 1980s synthesiser. Every single smart phone you ever owned, year on year. Data brimming spilling turning into a bitter electric swamp all these and everything else. A mesh network of the discards, unyoked from cycles of capital. The noise shuddered down the spine of every child in town, and we sent them away. Lately, it speaks to the adults.

[cwmoonglum]

There's warm coloured paint on the inside of the neat terraced house with the knocked through walls, where a group of people that used to be young together but who have lately given that up are dining. The host peeled each one as they came in, like shucking peas, emptying them into the living room and tossing their good winter coats on the bed upstairs; it's the warmth of bodies and conversation that clothes them now. This is the kind of place where you can spill wine on the tablecloth and no one cares, because they were listening to the story that made you gesticulate so wildly. Sure, the table is too small for everyone but they've squeezed together in tighter places, tougher times and terrible ones too. It's joy, even if the plates rattle together and I steal your fork or you drink my wine. It's joy. It's making love, or it could be drawing on love already made. Pour it out. It doesn't do to age it in the cellar; this was made to be shared.

[cwmoonglum]

The Professor

The arc; the arc of falling masonry that will has crushed Magnetic House and a passing schoolchild. It will have happened or it will happen or it is happening; a constant Hell of rubble and listed brickwork tumbled or tumbling or to be tumbled down in a final and forever moment. The great Strike against the tyranny of Time. Propaganda of the deed. What a deed it is/was/will be; the great dome swelling like a balloon and has popped.

Ted K. has blown up the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.

Joseph Conrad is hides his head in unsteady hands when they will have called him before Parliament; this will merited an enquiry. Scheduling will have proven difficult; things were out of joint. 'Mr K will has transposed the plot from your 1907 novel The Secret Agent. This has been your fault.' Conrad shot himself in the heart in 1878; things are echoing in reverse.

All the anarchists will have cheer and gabble and slap Ted upon the back. He will have been Freedom Club no longer he will be the Professor. Across the shifting seas of wrecked Time the piratical hordes of rebels strangled who will have been executed come to visit the Professor safe safe in the knowledge that the working day is DEAD.

[cwmoonglum]

‘Dash Fuel Process

The 'dash fuel process (DFP) was discovered accidentally in late 20XX by Dr Norman Sperrin, a retired chemistry professor who was unfriendly with his wife and relegated to the garage. With some refinement, it swiftly went to market and launched a goldrush amongst home owners who had lately lamented the rough outer skin that clad their houses. In layman's terms the process consists of only three steps;

Removal and reduction to powder of aged pebble/spardash

Primary chemical bath to remove impurities

Secondary chemical bath, consisting of Sperrin's trademarked secret process

After these steps are followed, the resulting slurry is a a hyperpotent, long lasting fuel that burns cleanly and at a fraction of the carbon cost of fossil alternatives.

French intellectuals have often remarked upon the importance of aged pebble/spar in the process, insisting that we have moved from burning Deep Time in the form of coal and gas to the drain spiral of burning human time. Jean Michel Pardonne in particular has questioned the widespread use of DFPs, and questioned, 'whether mankind has enough embodied time remaining to imbue future 'dash with the requisite properties to render it efficacious as a fuel.' A popular trend on the app TikTok imagines a world where our descendents live desperate lives in an apocalypse, grinding smartphones into dust to light their stoves.

It cannot go unremarked that after selling the rights of the process to British Petroleum, Dr Sperrin was found hung by the neck in Stovely Copse, a minor beauty spot within twenty minutes walk of his Victorian cottage. Despite the inevitable swirl of conspiracies around his apparent suicide, Dr Sperrin's survivors in the form of his widow, Bernice, and their two sons Stephen and George remain happy with the sealed purchase agreement signed with BP.

My own experience with DFP began recently, if indirectly, when my neighbour of twenty years Frank had the spardash on his house valued in excess of five million British pounds. Disdaining the concerns of his wife Barbara (a beautiful woman I once had a brief affair with, who no longer greets me in the street), Frank insisted on mining the 'dash himself. In fairness, the 'dash mining industry is rather wild west and there have been wide reports of underpayment and astronomically high processing fees. So Frank got his hammer and chisel and rented a skip.

I watched him work at it for a month, sweating and grunting. Barbara used to say he got like that when they made love. Myself, I'm rather more the languid type. I suppose the novelty of this wore off for her; perhaps she liked the way he snorted reflexively when the strain reached a certain point.

It was a grand snort of this sort that sent Frank off. The front of the house was mostly stripped of the pebbledash, but for a thin strip running under the eaves. Honestly, it looked a little ridiculous. Most people opt for harling to restore their houses, but in amateur cases like this the mining is so shoddy and uneven you wonder if it will cover all the divets. Up on his ladder with a lump hammer, Frank struck at the 'dash with renewed ferocity, sure it would yield soon and he could get started on the east wall. Later, we'd discover it was a particularly stuck on and rich vein he was chiselling at. Five, ten minutes became half an hour and his sweaty pinkness grew increasingly wobbly at the top of the ladder. Then the final grand effort; he snorted in a way that echoed over the entire street and seemed pushed backwards by the force of it. His round body fell in slow motion, like a balloon in reverse.

I attended the funeral, the first time that I spoke to Barbara since our last meeting in that Holiday Inn. Despite the renewed fortunes of the energy sector, the crematorium lights flickered and faded in a brownout. Barbara looked at the coffin expectantly as it rolled from view. Frank might have given one last snort.

[cwmoonglum]

Political Mushrooms I & II

i A fungus has memory; or, at least something like it; or memory is like what a fungus has, which if you have seen Super Mario Bros (1993) – an unfairly despised film – you will know is a kind of haunting. I was so frightened of the mushroom king, thought being turned into fungus so much worse than being a ghost, zombie or werewolf; constantly aware and growing outwards but so without a scream. A computer has memory; or, it does something that people call memory, but a computer doesn't have it; it's a machine for melting minds into fungus. Human awareness stretched beyond understanding, saprotrophic feeding on the ratioed posts Dinohattan thought leaders tweet out about how Koopa's cabinet is progressive and Lena is a dinosaur girlboss. The mushroom king can't scream, only expand and drop little Bob-ombs for Mario to toss around; how's that for a politics?

ii Ishirō Honda's 1963 film Matango also has people turn into fungus; shipwrecked on an island the protagonists become vicious things who turn on their friends after eating redcaps. Connecting to the mycelium's network corrupts the body and mind; though Honda claims it's all about drugs in the Sixties, it's hard not to look at the group and see; captain Murai, his shipmate Koyama, a writer, a celebrity, a rich guy, a singer and a student make up an average twitter thread, at least if we're arguing about boats. Murai ends the film with philosophy; humans, he speculates, aren't different from the mushroom monsters, mutant offspring of nuclear testing; we're just as quick to anger, territorial, growing without thought, just memory providing some kind of direction. But Murai wishes he'd stayed on the island; dying with his friends would mean at least that he'd be something like connected.

[cwmoonglum]

Dictator’s Club

In the end, Dictator's Club amounted to a single sheet of printer paper, tacked haphazardly to a wall mounted display board. It might have sat there for weeks, even to the end of the school year, had it not been for my friend Henry's outrage. I hesitate to call that outrage confected, but it certainly assuaged the sweet tooth of the soft play fascists, and he wasn't entirely innocent either.

The idea of Dictator's Club emerged organically enough amongst those of us who sat at the front of History class. Our teacher was in the early stages of writing a textbook, and produced masses of printouts formatted to draw wandering adolescent eyes. He was a brilliant teacher, and I should say none of this was his fault. But the political developments of the 1920s and 1930s could get rather Byzantine, and he had to break up his text somehow. He'd often ruminate upon textbook publishers' love affair with the swastika, and wanted to do something more interesting. Late nights on Google and scanning his own bookshelves rendered up the initiating image; Benito Mussolini sitting in an Alfa Romeo racecar while grinning drivers look on.

Of all the dictators we learned about, Mussolini was the most entertaining. He lacked the dour Teutonic terror of the Nazis, Franco's militarist grotesquery. Worried that his Fascist party didn't live up to their professed hypermasculine ideals, he made the old men take part in a PE day. In a word, he was silly. Fascism often is, in the way that scared lapdogs that bark at everything bigger than them are. Mussolini didn't stay silly the more that we learned, but his desperation to be liked by the old elite, his posturing and puffed feathers entertained the same cadre of my classmates who chuckled along with Churchillian putdowns like, 'my dear you are ugly, but tomorrow I shall be sober and you will still be ugly.'

The Chancellery of the Dictator's Club formed around Morgan, John and Dylan. They reflected exactly the kind of people that supported emergent fascism in the early twentieth century. Morgan was a petite bourgeois princeling aching to be recognised by Old Money. John was a religious fundamentalist; I regard him as a victim of his parents' cult behaviour, and half regret the time I gloatingly showed him a history book documenting the manifold ways the founders of his church violated their precepts on sexuality with one another's wives. Dylan was inexpressibly posh and wealthy; once found crying, when questioned he reported feeling sad that his family had to sell their boat. In an unparalleled feat of emotional gymnastics I offered commiserations, only to be met with the punchline, 'of course it's so we can buy a bigger one, but I had wanted to go sailing this weekend.'

Lurking on the outside were myself and Henry. History interested us, and we were teenagers enough to view the prurient details of the period with a certain awe. So when class ended on Thursday and rolled into lunch we stayed where we were, drawing more ancillary tales from our teacher or discussing the proclivities of the major players amongst ourselves. One day Morgan turned up with a badge he'd made; a printout of Mussolini's face with it's beefy, Futurist angles. With this pinned to his lapel he offered up copies to the rest of us. Of course he knew he couldn't get away with Mr H, but for a good week Benito went unnoticed.

Neither I nor Henry wore the badges, but the others loved them. Our informal chit chat gained the moniker Dictator's Club from the teacher. With Italian fascism wrapped up at the end of term, it was on to the big boys after Christmas; Hitler and Stalin. Henry remains an avowed socialist to this day, but he'd be the first to admit that his adolescent support for Stalin was in part petulant, bratty reaction to the rightist bent of Dictator's Club. Having refused to wear Mussolini on his lapel as a point of principle, he had no such qualms about Uncle Joe. Yet, here was a problem; the Chancellery of the Dictator's Club refused to acknowledge Stalin as a Dictator in good standing, and forcibly expelled Henry. At least, they refused to be drawn on any discussions of Soviet policy or Leftist politics more generally. After that, the printout.

Morgan, who had been most opposed to Stalin's inclusion in Dictator's Club and lacked entirely any sense of irony went home one Thursday and drew up two lists. One list; Dictators that made the cut. The other list; Leftist rulers, many not Dictators in any proper sense. Henry was aghast, easy to get a rise out of. It's a reaction the right have always fed on, that we see every day on the internet. I can still see the gloating faces of the Chancellery, lacking but the facial scars that would have marked them as the aristocratic Nazis they liked to pretend they were. With our history chats spiralling into arguments and strife, I all but dropped away. Then, after class one day Morgan and Dylan passed out not just to our little group but the entire class a printout containing pictures of; Mussolini, Franco, Pinochet, Lavr Kornilov, Batista... all the big names, and some chinless aristocratic reactionaries whom Dylan felt a particular affinity with.

Most of the class tossed the printouts away on their exit from the classroom. Henry tore his up. The Chancellery laughed, pinned the printout to the display board and left. The next day the Vice Principal had been tipped off, and had a Very Serious Conversation with the Chancellery. Like anyone correctly accused of fascist sympathies post-1945 they made the right noises and denied it was anything but a joke that had gone too far. Henry, they dogged with accusations that he was the informant who destroyed Dictator's Club. Seizing on his fascination with Stalin they taunted him that his days were numbered, and he'd be informed on soon enough. Still, they had to turn in their badges. The next year they switched to pictures of Margaret Thatcher.

[cwmoonglum]

night haunts

the day never seems to reach noon in this cramped and decaying place by the river; grey clouds obscure the sun at its apex and dead looking trees cage the listless bags blown from the Tesco over the road.

once the people here filed out of their houses smoked, joked, jostled and hammered for pay from men who wouldn't care to look at them, but no afternoon sun remains for the dead factories, masonry turgid with age. as the century aged they fell to sleep one by one, so that soon enough the workers were gone; children of those workers point at bricks, remembering to their own children that once upon a time their grandfathers laboured therein.

now workshops are night haunts for teenagers who drink what they can steal from their parents or convince a stranger to buy in the Tesco. bored, they toss empty bottles in a corner, or shuttle across the partly subsided factory floor in a stolen shopping trolley. forearms are scuffed, sometimes broken; the trolley ends up in the river. stagnant even before the work dried up, the river encircles the estate like a gutter. all waste ends up here; a discarded pram, lego, the fungal bloat of a ruined mattress. shopping trolleys, of course.

on the walls which enclose the river's side; the scrawled names of many generations, bills for a club since closed, threats, boasts and a council sponsored mural of a union man, daubed up recently by a not quite local artist.

[cwmoonglum]

Sexual Problems Clive

Predictably, the party sucked. I'd told Owen when he had invited me that I didn't know anyone on the Facebook event, but when my plans for the night fell through I wound up there anyway. There were maybe forty people, crammed uncomfortably into a windowless living room and kitchen. Owen had blocked access to his and his flatmates' rooms with a laundry basket that smelled of dog food, and the cloying fog of incense and weed smoke did not disguise it.

Clutching a pilfered alcopop, I hid in the hallway, hoping the shadows would prevent the owner from spotting its neon hue. Owen had disappeared to his room with the one other person I knew at the party, and their counter rhythm disrupted the awful goa trance the hippies had put on. I had decided to make my exit, when a gangly, jittery guy I had noticed similarly lurking at the edges of the party walked over. Without introducing himself, he started talking at length about UFOs and alien-human hybrids. A little drunk, I didn't quite follow and joked that I'd just started watching the X Files too. “Then you know!” he near-screamed in my face, “the X Files is basically a documentary!” This was back in 2009, so this wasn't the kind of opinion you encountered that often. The stoners I sometimes hung out with would speculate aimlessly about the moon landings, but nobody really meant it.

“I'm Clive by the way,” he said as I tried to guess if he was wearing literal tin foil under his grotty beanie hat. Over the next hour, it became clear that Clive at least had his heart in the right place. His politics were cartoonish but generally fine. He'd just skipped right past organic farming and chakra realigning to this shit. At length a dreadlocked folk singer distracted him, and I slipped away.

A month passed, and I spotted Clive at another party. Being polite, I waved hello, and he leapt on my unintended invitation to come share how his theories had developed. He hit me up with something about mobile phones forming a mesh network that would scan human bodies so the government could make pod people, and how processed foods were laced with additives that increased the scan resolution. This one got the attention of some other hippies hanging nearby and I was able to escape. Later that night Owen turned up, and explained that 'Alien Clive' was his sort-of dealer. He was living in his uncle's grow operation and siphoning off some of the supply for himself. The host, a towering Italian tennis player named Paolo, elaborated; Alien Clive was squatting at the grow op while his uncle was out of the country. The party ended with the arrival of the police. Owen and I dashed into the nearby woods and navigated home by the light of our phones. I heard from Paolo that Clive had leapt into a bin, fallen asleep and only been discovered during the next day's clean up.

My girlfriend at the time, Noelle, didn't like Alien Clive. Among his conspiracy theories were some about sperm retention, antimasturbation preaching and something that would be eugenics if he'd had the wherewithal to think it through. Women found it especially repellent because he'd get eyebleedingly stoned and claim to be hypersexual and 'supernaturally gifted in the creation of orgasms [sic].' Of course, he still managed to get an invite to Noelle's birthday party, because he could supply weed.

The party was perfectly normal. People got drunk, got high, stripped naked and stood atop wheelie bins pretending to be myriad Greek philosophers. The Japanese guy living with Paolo brought a literal suitcase full of Tenga eggs and started passing them out in exchange for introductions to blonde women. Alien Clive called him a Satanist and said Tenga was a conspiracy to weaken the gene pool. Eventually, things began to wind down and people drifted home, but Alien Clive remained. He sat around a fire lit in a metal bin, warming his hands and sipping the dregs of cider. My girlfriend and I joined him, lighting a cigarette each. Noelle was drunk, and oddly enough had found Clive's argument over the Tenga eggs chivalrous in a bizarre way. Knowing that it was a prohibitively costly for him to get a taxi back to the rural grow op, she reluctantly offered him the couch to crash on. The fire flickered between us, glinting off Clive's glassy eyes as his face turned dark. “No, I don't think that's a good idea,” he said grimly. We must have looked as confused as I felt, because he elaborated, “that would cause... problems.” “What do you mean, Clive?” asked Noelle. “It would cause problems... sexual problems.” We laughed, and explained that we were dating and at any rate we'd be sleeping in a different room. “I have very powerful pheromones, so I can't help it, you'd be drawn to me. Sexually. Sexual problems.”

We sat quietly around the fire, unable to form a response. When Noelle finished her cigarette she threw the butt in the fire and headed towards her bedroom. “You can still use the couch dude, don't be weird.” Clive and I extinguished the fire. He walked off into the dark, alone. From then on no matter how much he talked about Zeta Reticulans, Nordics, Reptilians, Insectoids or Energy Beings he would remain Sexual Problems Clive.

[cwmoonglum]

The Fabulist Huddle

Perhaps the most impressive video game I can recollect from my adolescent is one that I never actually played. It was merely explained to me, over the course of months, as I waited each weekday for the bus home after school. Not having a particularly powerful PC at home, I was in 2004 still playing Total Annihilation: Kingdoms, a strategy game that had come bundled not with the dark, futuristic Dell we had then, but the beige Compac that had taken the place of my parents' record player. Originally released in 1999, Kingdoms was an epic fantasy for my impressionable mind, at once astonishing for its scale and titillating in its portrayal of near nude monster women. Trying to discuss it with friends at the bus stop, however, I found them little interested in what was already a defunct cultural product.

As should be clear, my friends and I were not the coolest or most popular children at school. I can recollect sitting in the coveted back seats of the school bus precisely once; my friend smoked a menthol cigarette, had a panic attack and threw up into a half eaten packet of ready salted crisps. Regardless, so long as we huddled together we weren't harassed or bullied. An overly animated disquisition on Dragonlance might arouse snide commentary from those around us, but everyone else was equally a teenager, equally concerned with not standing out, or standing out in the right way. In this huddle then, we were free to discuss at length, for forty minutes or so a day (dependent on traffic) the appendixes of The Lord of the Rings, cartoons and video games.

Two people in this huddle, which was changeable in its membership though consistent in social ranking, are important here. One, hirsute, garrulous and towering, was wonderfully flamboyant in all the wrong ways for high school. The other, though a few years older, was short and quietly spoken, a rash of acne across his forehead and a pronounced lisp demoting him to stand apart from those his own age. I say there are two; in truth their friendship was so close that they appeared to work as one mind. They finished one another's thoughts, and seemed inseparable; let's call them then one person, Perry.

It was Perry that I tried to interest in Kingdoms, but the scion of a middle class family his home computer was light years ahead of what I was working with. Kingdoms was outdated, strategy games had moved on. What Perry was playing instead was a beta version of a game that his uncle was developing. The working title: Lego Wars. It was immediately obvious even to my 12 year old self that Perry's 'uncle' didn't exist, but the mind(s) he possessed were such natural storytellers that within that first forty minutes of explaining it that our little huddle was hooked. Henceforth, every day that Perry was at the bus stop we'd gather around to hear about the game. Lego Wars, it should be noted, had nothing to do with Lego, the plastic brick company. It was a source of great annoyance and ongoing legal proceedings which Perry's uncle was unable to talk much about. Instead, the game was a 4x grand strategy game, though sometimes it was a real time strategy game, though of course you could descend to play the game through the eyes of a single soldier in your army. Fresh off Tolkien and hyped up by Warhammer this combination was intoxicating. I knew little enough about computers that I could pretend it was possible, or even desirable. And it was important to have such a range of control over one's characters, because as Perry explained, the world of Lego Wars was one riven by conflict. A pastoral world of magic and legend, it had lately been invaded by dark technologies, precipitating a descent into apocalyptic war between science and wizardry. As a play tester, Perry had plugged in hundreds of hours into the game, and explained that the dialogue and character growth was dynamic and reactive, allowing the player's Wizard Kings and Techlords a depth of history and characterisation that stopped just short of reality. The graphics, Perry told us, were 'like a movie;' hadn't Peter Jackson's The Two Towers featured orc armies on a scale hitherto undreamed of? 'Similar technology,' apparently, was utilised in Lego Wars.

It's often boring being a teenager. That's why our little huddle allowed the story to go on so long. Not one of us really believed Perry, and he wasn't stupid enough to think that we did. It was like when another of our friend, Nick, decided that his uncle had perished in 9/11. He warned us when we visited his house never to mention it, as his apparently happy, carefree family were in reality a ruin waiting to topple at even the hint of their dead relative. Oddly, Nick's brother couldn't recall said uncle, but neither did he have time for his lying kid brother's friends to explain further. Trying to stand out, in the right way, is always difficult. Whether whipped up by Tolkien, Greek mythology or the pull of real tragedy all of us were trying to explicate what was in our hearts. A longing to be heroes made us lie, obfuscate and embroider; a longing to be left alone or be beyond mortal fears made us claim special victimhood. For my part, the lies were banal; claiming to have read a certain book, to have played a certain game, the little performances with which we decorate the superstructure of our egos as we try to make others like us. For others, I'm now able to acknowledge, things were more complicated. Perry, Nick and many beside were not just teenagers, but under a religious scrutiny which barely admitted them to breathe. Such an outpouring of fiction was, I think, a hopeful reordering of their worlds that allowed them a beneficent uncle, a reason for their family's coldness toward them, a chance to descend from the calculating dissociation they insulated themselves with and enter into the body of a legendary hero. Our little group atomised as our interests diverged. The day after the release of The Return of the King was the last time we held court at the bus stop. Like the movie, we were simply reassessing past themes, eager perhaps to reach the finish line. The discovery of rock music acted as an escape hatch for some of us to be losers still, but of a different stripe. Last I saw one half of Perry he had become a forensic pathologist, a fine profession for such a fabulist. His uncle never released Lego Wars, presumably the fault of some litigious Danes.

[cwmoonglum]

War Games

It's hard to remember how people felt in the weeks between September 11th and the launch of Operation Enduring Freedom. The psychic damage of the terrorist attack was perhaps the first truly global event I remember in detail. Previously, the only thing I can recollect dominating television screens in the same way was the death of Princess Diana.

The thing is, back then I was twelve years old and, like most people around me, I rather liked America. It was where most cultural production came from, so in a childish – if accurate – way I thought of it as the capital of the world. And New York was the capital of America, at least the pop cultural America that gave me the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Batman, Men in Black and the like. Anyone who wanted to attack America had to be someone like Shredder, the Joker or that gross skin-stealing cockroach alien who guzzles sugar water.

The weeks after September 11th were the first time people around me paid any attention to the theatre of politics. It's the moment I can first recollect where reality began melting down and people behaved like they were playing an Alternate Reality Game. Al Qaeda were Shredder, with a worldwide network of Foot Clan ninjas waiting to destroy civilisation. Later, as attempts to track down the masterminds of the terrorism stalled, kids would play 'find Bin Laden,' which was just Hide and Seek with a beating for anyone that got caught. Unlike the hazy, barely comprehensible Balkan conflict, Afghanistan had a simply story.

It's worth noting that Enduring Freedom, a name that reads as a bitter joke in itself, was not the original name for the operation. Rather, it was to be called Operation Infinite Justice. Very comic book. And just the wrong side of the 'World Police' criticism that would dog America very soon. It was changed to prevent offending Muslims, who regard infinity as the realm of God. This did not prevent the president from referring to the operation as a 'crusade.'

Such subtleties went overlooked by my twelve year old self and my friends. Rather, we heard the beat of the war drums and the demands for blood and nodded sagely. Yes, we said, America will take her revenge. There was noone more invested in this than my friend Raphael, who in the days leading up to the invasion used all his print credits in the school library to print out maps of Afghanistan. Come lunch time, he walked around the playground handing them out, and encouraged everyone to draw up their own invasion plan. I wonder now how much television he was watching, as he had a not unimpressive knowledge of the culture and regions of a country he had never even heard of two months ago.

Perhaps Raphael was a Company plant, and the US invasion force was using the typewriter/monkey approach to war planning. He did collect the completed maps, after all. So maybe the uninformed speculation of schoolboys in the North of Ireland trickled up to the Pentagon. Or maybe not. Certainly, few of Raphael's more elaborate ideas for the American military saw the light of day. These included riot shields made of tank armour and quasi-light sabres. White phosphorous munitions were used in 2009, and probably more often than we know about. Raphael was just excited by the idea after learning about magnesium in chemistry class.

Sometime between the commencement of the war in Afghanistan and that in Iraq, something changed. A lot of us decided that we didn't like America. The President, George W. Bush, was kind of an idiot. He was a fun cartoon foil for a villain like Shredder, but as we watched things explode on the nightly news, it became clear that an idiot shouldn't have access to all those munitions. The mask slipped, and while it took many of us – myself included – a long time to develop a political theory after politics was murdered in 1991, we knew enough to hate America. We were children of the End of History, but History had just shoved its hand through the fresh gravedirt and clambered out.

When the Iraq War was spooling up, the very same kids who had a few years ago been drawing up invasion maps with Raphael were openly deriding American attempts to project power. Cultural products were still American. More so than ever, in fact. When I think of the mid 00s, I wonder at just how dominate the US was before the internet allowed other perspectives to creep in. Consequently, when I think about opposition to the Iraq War, I think about a song by Le Tigre, which includes clips of the rallies against imperial violence worldwide. The antiwar movement was colossal. It even managed to spark a protest at my school/Deep State war planning facility. When the bell rang to signal the end of lunch, hundreds of kids refused to enter their classrooms and milled about aimlessly, showing each other their polyphonic ringtones and gossiping. A vanguard of older kids tried to start chants, but the absurdity of it meant they dwindled away pretty quickly. Glad as we were to take part in the action, few of us thought that news of our disobedience was going to be passed up from the teachers to the Education Authority, and from there to the government, US diplomats and eventually George W. Bush himself. It was nice to see Raphael trying to lead the chants though.

[cwmoonglum]

Sparky’s Dream

Mitch was devastated when his best friend Sparky died. He posted a short note on his VampireFreaks.com profile explaining what had happened. No, it hadn't been suicide. Sparky had been depressed, yes, but he'd died in a car accident. A perfectly mundane and unfair way to die. Sparky had been middlingly infamous amongst the goth and emo kids in their hometown. He had amazing hair; a perfect flat ironed black swoop, and the pale, almost girlish face of an elf prince. This and his habit of posting oblique references to self harm and teenage misery via the medium of rock lyrics attracted a certain sort of crowd. Mainly girls; boys less graced in their bone structure saw Sparky as an object of jealousy and contempt.

Somehow, Sparky's death started an alchemical reaction that transferred some measure of infatuation onto Mitch. Mitch did not look like a morose elven princeling. He looked more like Apple, his old English sheepdog. Both had an unkempt mop of hair, and the same bouncy energy. But with Sparky's death, Mitch was newly sad and apparently newly attractive. Girls talked to him on MSN Messenger. Ruth, who always used a picture of a Living Dead Doll as her avatar, told Mitch how much his friendship had meant to the often gloomy Sparky. “I saw him in town the week before the accident,” she said, “he was really, really sad as usual but he was so excited to talk about you Mitch. You were like a brother to him.” Mitch thanked her. “I miss him nearly as much as you do Mitch,” said Ruth, “we actually kissed that day, and I was hoping he'd ask me to be his girlfriend.”

Ruth was lying. I can state this unequivocally. Because Sparky had never met her in person. Because Sparky didn't exist.

Both Sparky and Mitch were fictions, fake accounts on VampireFreaks.com that my friend Josh and I maintained as a joke that got out of hand. He'd begun by griping about how pretty emo boys with straight hair and skinny jeans were more popular than he'd ever be. Sparky was his attempt to prove it. I improvised Mitch to give his creation a veneer of reality; a dumb show friendship so Sparky looked less obviously false. Their pictures were both grabbed off Google images, and while I can't say for certain I suspect the real people never met.

Josh used to lurk in sex chatrooms to bait paedophiles. He'd pretend to be a young girl or boy, draw people into conversation and then if they persisted in sending pornographic messages upon 'discovering' their chat partner's 'real age' he'd paste in a prepared text along the lines of, 'Please note: engaging with sexual relations with a minor is illegal under US law. This IP address 1XX.13.43X.1 has been logged by the FBI.' When the panicked person on the other end asked what was going on, he'd pretend not to have sent the message or to be unable to see it. Mostly they logged off, and Josh quickly got bored of the game. Sparky was a more involved project, and locating him in our hometown made it more interesting to him.

In our town, most of the alternative, goth and emo kids all hung around the same spot. So Sparky and Mitch had to talk about being there. This was easy enough. We were into rock music and skateboarding ourselves, so we knew people there. Friends without an online presence were useful, because they might have hung out with Sparky and Mitch. They wouldn't discredit things on the website, and it explained why there were no pictures with them. Moreover, because we were there ourselves we could have Sparky talk about the old drunk who glassed a kid for refusing him change, or the punks who fought a Burger King security guard. Observable things which had actually happened made these fake boys realer.

With this baseline established, it was easy to breathe life into Sparky by having him post morose nonsense on VampireFreaks.com on a semi-regular basis. Mitch didn't post as often, because we'd decided that he had a plethora of after school activities to keep him busy. Sparky, though, required a little more explanation. So we decided, irritated by the happy clappy Christian kids around us, that he was the atheist son of an intensely religious family. He was only allowed a limited number of hours online a week. This was a good choice, because it meant he had something to post about as well, “Great. My parents took my rock CDs away because they 'promote Satan.' I hate them.”

When he'd created his emo Frankenstein, Josh had been pretty certain that Sparky would prove his teenaged, misogynistic theory about girls liking pretty boys. And to a degree it did; Sparky's friend list rapidly swelled as emo kids were thirst trapped by the false princeling. But in reality Josh spent so much time maintaining Sparky that you might argue it was the mask's willingness to listen to and sympathise with people that made him so popular. Josh wouldn't bother listening to a girl complain about her looks beyond gruff reassurance that he thought she was 'fit.' Sparky, on the other hand presented what Josh regarded as a mocking, feminised ad lib on body shame and feeling worthless that people actually responded to.

More and more people wanted a piece of Sparky. And some offered up trinkets of personal information we were uncomfortable holding. So it was only a matter of time before the IRL problem became too big to avoid. So far, we'd fictionalised a number of visits to town that people had just missed Sparky and Mitch at. They lived far enough out into the countryside that it was a little difficult for them to visit all that often. And finally, Sparky had been grounded for a month. But that time was swiftly running out, and people were clamouring to see him.

I was getting bored with the game; it was cruel and had gotten way out of hand. So I left the account fallow for a week, and then another. Then Josh killed Sparky, and I moved to wrap things up. Mitch's family had to move to California, where his father had landed a job with Google. He was sad to say goodbye to everyone, but it felt less mean spirited than killing him off. I didn't like Mitch, but lots of people did apparently, despite never meeting him. Adolescence, loneliness and an internet connection are powerful things.

A few weeks after Mitch departed for California I was riding the bus home alone when I overheard a girl with blue hair talking to her New Rock-clad friend. “It's so sad, his best friend died and then his family moved him so far away.” Her friend murmured in agreement. Then the blue haired girl looked forlornly out the window, tears misting her gaze, “And the worst thing is, we had just started going out!”

[cwmoonglum]

Excession & Annihilation

The titular event/object of Iain M Banks Excession is what the author terms an 'Outside Context Problem,' something that Banks characterises as a normally once in a civilisational lifespan occurrence. His go to example via his experience playing Sid Meier's Civilization game series is that of steamships intruding into territories where the dominant civilisation relies on wind power. Both our own histories and those of the myriad doomed aristocracies that I created in Meier's games attest to the fact that such Outside Context Problems often presage societal collapse. Whether this results in colonisation or in renewal, integration of the OCP is a civilisationally generative force that renders preceding political/social structures unsustainable. The power of the Tokugawa Shogunate is invariably weakened by the intrusion of Commodore Perry; Satsuma and Chōshū samurai can assert themselves as part of a world system and appeal to Western powers for aid in reshaping Japan.

'Excession' itself means 'a going out or forth,' and it's easy to read transitional moments in this manner. Equally, we can render it a pun as an expression of ratcheting up civilisational tiers; rather than succeeding feudally the transition exceeds the containing system. Yoshinobu Tokugawa's abdication is a radical disjuncture that precedes not another Age of Warring States where daimyo fillet one another to become the next Shogun, but a moment where the exceeding power of Western technoscience results in a total shift towards new political and social forms.

Such moments are the bread and butter of science fiction. Whether this is in 'first contact' stories where the inhabitants of Earth are invaded/subjected to quasi-religious revelation or the Sense of Wonder school's obsession with confronting the vicissitudes of Deep Time. Banks' Excession is in the end a transitory event/object; a consciousness that transits between universes and cannot be perceived even by the hyperintelligent machines that run the advanced civilisation of the Culture. Definitionally, this cannot be integrated without a shift in what the Culture is for (ostensibly, self perpetuation).

The technowarriors of Alex Garland's adaptation of Annihilation face a similar problem to the Culture's Minds, but react in ways several civilisational stages below. On Earth, in the present day, an alien event/object has crashlanded. Like the Zone of the Strugatsky's/Tarkovsky or M. John Harrison's Kefahuchi Tract, the Shimmer is an area completely resistant the contemporary technoscience. It exceeds our understanding despite years of research and multiple intrusions by (importantly) military forces. Garland presents the Shimmer event/object as a source of mystery, both occluding its meaning and occluded from the civilisation by the military-industrial Tokugawa analogues, 'the Southern Reach' who only see in it their own death. The protagonist, a biologist named Lena, has lost her husband to the Shimmer and resolves to enter it herself. In this, she is a typical science hero who is joined by a cadre of others (an EMT, a psychologist, a physicist, a geologist). Notably, this is the first nonmilitary group to enter the Shimmer; yet Lena is exmilitary, the psychologist is a government employee and all enter armed and armoured in the livery of patriarchal technoscience.

The film follows the logic of a horror video game; the supposed science heroes stagger from one set piece to the next picking up notes left by previous incursions into the Shimmer. They kill a mutated alligator, they watch a recording of Lena's husband slicing open his teammate to reveal a digestive tract that moves like a snake. Being inside the Shimmer is acting upon the very biology of those within it. Lena and the technowarriors accompanying her react largely with horror; the Shimmer represents a boundary violating queerness on multiple levels. The Shimmer is growing. Momentarily occluded from civilisation by explanation of a oil spill, the Southern Reach has internalised its own lie and can only view the Shimmer as an unintelligent polluting event.

Yet, the boundaries it violates are more than geographical or even biological. The Shimmer reawakens the scientists fear of an active Nature outside the control of patriarchal technoscience and modern consumption. Consider that this Outside Context Problem crashlanded in a national park, where Nature is safely contained. The growth of the Shimmer represents a civilisational danger because it will eventually encompass cities, people. Rather than the obedient Nature understood/constrained by technoscience, this mutant strain both acts with and upon the bodies and minds of those dispatched to study it. In fact, like the superconsciousness of Banks' novel it is in actuality an event/subject, violating the normative scientific dispassionate observer by looking back. This provides a neat mirroring of the central thread of Lena's psychology, where she is riven by guilt because of her violation of the boundaries of her heterosexual marriage. Her husband, she thinks, accepted an apparent suicide mission because he observed that she had cheated on him.

It transpires (or is indeed obvious from the title) that Lena's mission is not a mission of integration or understanding of the OCP, but a fascistic attempt to reseal Pandora's box. The technowarriors are dispatched to foreclose on the liberatory mutation offered by the Shimmer (for isn't all evolution driven by mutation?) and reassert the primacy of patriarchy, heterosexuality and military technoscience. Only the physicist on the team accedes to a dialogue with the Shimmer, accepting its action upon her DNA and mutating into a swirl of leaves that is carried away on the wind. For Lena, a filial warrior, the Shimmer's repurposing of human DNA to grow trees in human shapes or give a human voice to a mutant bear is grotesque because it ruptures a technological hierarchy and suggests forms of being-with Nature rather than being-over, using it. Nature, in the Shimmer, is a libidinal force that requires strict control lest it cause hurt like her own libido. Yet, it is notable that the protagonists of Garland's film can only conceive of this new generative model as essentially inferior. It is queerness understood as mimicry and grotesque pastiche.

Nowhere is this understanding clearer than in the climax of the film, where Lena finds the source of the Shimmer. Walking past the high camp decoration of a beach littered with sparkling glass trees, she enters into a lighthouse where an alien object crashed. She finds a video of her husband's suicide, concluding her suspicion that the returnee who looks like him is a Shimmer-generated clone. More importantly, she finds a genital-like hole (replete with pubic hair-like extrusions of plant matter) and descends therein to an alien womb, which generates a mirrored, non-humangendered creature. This creature mimics Lena's movements directly, and is accompanied by musical noises similar to the work of queer artist Arca (indeed the design of the creature recalls the work of her collaborator Jesse Kanda). Lena interprets the touch of this queer alien subject as aggression, even as it lies alongside her and engages in dance-like communication. Pushing her to the floor to rise again in sync, the alien feels more like a child than an invader. If this subject is acting upon Lena biologically, it can only be understood as a laudible attempt at xenocommunication. This xenogenerative biological sharing (think here of the Oankali in Octavia Butler's Lilith's Brood) is too queer, can only be understood as penetrative invasion of the patriarchal human subject. For Lena to accept it would be to reenact her infidelity on a civilisational scale. So, she kills it.

Disturbingly, once she returns she claims to the Southern Reach that the alien made no attempt to communicate. She tells a lie to reestablish the boundaries of civilisation, and is rewarded by a parallel chance to reestablish her heterosexual couple form with the clone of her husband. That the film closes with their eyes glimmering in an alien fashion doesn't trouble the patriarchal technoscience of their civilisation; they have integrated the queerness of the Shimmer into heterosexuality and human boundaries.

The OCP is defeated and subsumed by the forces of reaction in a way that is only possible in fiction, foreclosing on the new ways of being with Nature that are vital to reforming and revolutionising civilisation in the same way that queerness opens vital paths to reforming our social and cultural relations. Per Donna Haraway, we are living through 'ongoing multi-species stories and practices of becoming-with in times that remain at stake, in precarious times, in which the world is not finished and the sky has not fallen—yet.' Annihilation presupposes that the only way out is to reassert the primacy of the human, and demand that history = man + tool. Being-with is determined to be perverse, frightening and dangerous; in this the film isn't wrong. But such perversity and terror inevitably overflows any container humanity can build. Nature is on the march, and only the perverse and the queer will survive Her terror. We need to exceed current forms; the alternative is Annihilation.

[cwmoonglum]

The Grid of Misery

cw: suicide, self harm In 2005 the kids at my school were obsessed with a simple website lost to history that functioned as a sort of combination of twitter and PostSecret. The home page was a grid of multihued squares. Each square was a post – importantly, an anonymous post. The users could alter the text colour, formatting and background colour. There was no such thing as the like or share function. Nevertheless, this anonymous site was equally as addicting as later forms of social media, because these messages revealed the internal turmoil teenagers felt. The posts were, unless signed, untraceable. They discussed self harm, eating disorders, feeling ugly, feeling great, homosexuality, pining after crushes. Everyone in my social group used the site, and many nights were wasted in MSN Messenger group chats trying to parse the grid for clues as to the posters. Eulogies for earlier iterations of the internet often miss an important fact; the internet has always been a sad place.

I remember the first time someone online told me that they were going to kill themselves. I was 14, and posting on the Wizards of the Coast forums, specifically the Dungeons and Dragons boards. Truthfully told, I wasn't gaining much traction, because it seemed like most of the userbase was older than I was. But I did connect with one poster, Hassan, who happened to be an Assassin. By this I don't mean that he played an Assassin in D&D, though of course he did. Rather, Hassan claimed descent from an actual حشّاشين , a devotee of Rashid al-Din Sinan. Logging into AOL instant messenger, we would often discuss the exploits of the assassins during the era of the Crusades. Hassan's favourite story was that of an assassin who, as Saladin besieged their mountain fortress, entered the Sultan's war camp in the dead of night and left him a steaming plate of regional baked goods – and a poisoned dagger. Saladin switched to diplomacy after this, but Hassan was enamoured of the assassin's dedication, their willingness to risk death.

Like a lot of kids that get into D&D, Hassan wasn't too popular at school. It was also 2004, and he lived in America. As our chats went on, he began to open up; even his friends that played D&D with him were starting to get sucked up in the racist fervour around the Iraq War. Girls did not like him. His town was small, and his family isolated even as his father tried to blithely disregard the hate directed at them. Paranoid, unhappy and victimised one day he logged in and told me that he was going to kill himself by hanging. I stayed online for hours trying to talk him out of it, heart in my throat even as I grew irritated and bored with the circular logic of his depression. Our last few chats followed this pattern. Then one day he told me he was moving to college to study computer science. He never logged in from that account again; I assume he made it out alive.

In 2007, a Virginian teen was suspended from school for creating and carrying around a replica Death Note notebook. Like in the manga and the anime, he used it to record how he wanted people who victimised him to die. Going forward, there would be a spate of such incidents; many if not most moved online, using early social media or services like Formspring to create databases of gossip, bullying and venting that terrified school administrators. Wearing masks or posting anonymously allowed teenagers to express and explore extremes of feeling that were impossible in daily life. Indeed, researcher danah boyd wrote a blog post observing the phenomenon of unhappy teenagers engaging in 'digital self harm' whereby they created sock puppet accounts to bully themselves. Whether such children were trying to gain sympathy, call attention to their emotional agony or further punish themselves the internet was in effect a space for the transmission of unhappiness too overpowering to express in reality.

Much of this happened anonymously, or in digital dress up in obscure corners of the internet. Awakening one morning and checking on a forum I moderated, I found that an otherwise secretive user who refused to discuss their private life had filled the boards with graphic images of self harm. Not knowing what to do, I deleted the images, apologised to those that had seen them and spent the remainder of the week fretting that the user wasn't returning my concerned messages. Was the effect of the network a loosening of social injunctions against displaying such emotional pain, or was there a viral component whereby such thoughts and images lodged in your head? Many of the people on such boards struggled with similar problems, but there was no algorithm driving engagement as there is nowadays.

It wasn't just Hassan. There were many times I and others would befriend a stranger on the internet, only to find ourselves a few weeks later talking them down from suicide. Unprepared teenagers acting as crisis counsellors to one another through lonely nights filled with blue screen light and music piped through tinny headphones. The sheer number of such encounters informs me now that at least some of them were deliberately toying with the credulous, soft hearted fools on the other side of the screen. Another part of me objects; the urge to perform such turmoil before strangers suggests a deep loneliness that was only pretending to pretend. Like my peers on the microblogging grid site, each and every user was desperately wishing to be decoded, to have their pain revealed, affirmed, forgiven.

[cwmoonglum]

Reversion

It was fifteen Octobers ago and the three of us were sweating in Tom's coffin sized room because his sister Caroline was using the shared computer. Left with little else to do but watch the same ten looping videos on Scuzz TV and play cards we swiftly grew disillusioned with the few games we knew. Having no money made most of the games dull; there was more tension in wondering when the shelves in Tom's room would give way under the weight of the home recorded VHS tapes of Coronation Street he kept.

We might have gone outside, but none of us were sporty. Instead, we decided to create a new game: Reversion. The rules elude me now (as then), but I can still picture the cards laid out. Seven cards formed an H (originally a sad R we agreed looked more like an A), and the rest were divided amongst the players equally. It was difficult perched on Tom's bed to hold such a large hand correctly, and we often dropped them.

Every card played in Reversion had to be played next to another, Tetrising the original H beyond recognition. The cards had a cascading effect on every other card in play, swapping their places or forcing your opponents to pick them up. This was the aim of the game: discard your hand, and revert the cards in play to your opponents'. 

Constructing the rules was easy, learning to apply them was harder. Our dog eared notes were hastily rewritten as flaws and simple win strategies appeared. This was proof that Reversion was a real game, because we cared enough to insist on an element of truly random luck. Eventually, the formal rules were agreed, though the sheet looked more like Caroline's MSN chats than anything so lofty. Tom's sister had bound custom emoticons to nearly all of her keys, so that her sentences looked Tokyo hieroglyphic, all flashing lights and pictograms. We had tried objecting to her taking the shared computer on this basis, but this fell on deaf ears. This, too, was the application of the rules.

Tom's dad was a cop, and had a cop's insistence on the rules. Reversion was a game we played in near silence, and Caroline listened to 'My Humps' furtively, on headphones. A card played in Reversion had a cascading effect, and could swiftly upturn the order of the game.

A drizzly Saturday morning one month after we invented the game, we held the finals of the World Championship. The people we had foisted the game on during school had fallen aside. I suspect they didn't fully grasp the rules. Tom, however, had yet to lose a game.

With no proper recollection of Reversion I can't tell you how he did it. Even when Tom explained it later, all he managed to do was convince me of the gulf between our minds. I was, at the time, having near nightly arguments with my parents about how much I detested maths class. No wonder, then, that it appeared a form of magic to me. Our hands would swell phonebook fat in our hands while Tom cackled and brayed and his VHS tapes trembled on the shelf. His mother crept up the stairs to whisper at him to keep it down. He dutifully apologised, and we decided to spend the little money we had anointing Tom as the champion.

Tom's dad wasn't the kind to give lifts, so we were soaked through by the time we got to Burger King. Tom was disappointed when he found out that they didn't have any cardboard crowns left. I made him one out of napkins instead.

[cwmoonglum]

The Atomic Death of the Moon

20/05/07 – The Moon is on Fire. Atomic death pours from the skies. Sneaking onto the family computer at 7.30am per my orders, I find my email inbox flooded with furious diplomatic cables. My real life friend, fresh from holding Stalinist show trials of those who objected to a recently ratified treaty, is facing fresh calls to resign. In the parlance of the day; the moon is closed.

In 2007, adolescence was being revolutionised by access to an internet much more anarchic than today's. Youtube was only two years old, music was something to be downloaded illegally via megaupload and imageboards proliferated. Within a year 'Anonymous' would announce its opposition to Scientology in the much touted Project Chanology; a celebrated mainstream debut that often overshadows its precursor events. Anonymous – a loose alliance of mainly teenagers drawn from across the constellation of imageboards – had been conducting 'raids' for years prior to Chanology. From the occupation of Habbo Hotel with offensive statements and racial caricatures to the scripting of endlessly self-replicating cubes and storms of horse dicks that would crash Second Life servers, the absurd and often cruel humour of the group was stamped across the internet. Anonymous were the degraded Situationists of the commercialising internet, squeezing jouissance from the newly colliding social groups of odd hobbyists, lonely eccentrics and baffled normies.

 With widening internet access yet many people connecting via low powered computers, a market emerged for browser games. In these, roleplaying and metagaming were as compelling as in narrative games. One such game that persists today,Cyber Nations, found itself targeted by Anonymous. A political simulation game where players controlled their own nations, the gameplay was itself was fairly monotonous, but the wider system of alliance forming resulted in elaborate treaties, wars and diplomacy that was truly gripping. On Cyber Nations, Anonymous went under the banner of /b/ (named for the 'random' board on, amongst others, 4chan), and spent 7 months growing itself. With a loose governing structure, /b/ existed mostly on the sidelines before it was dragged into Great War III, a multi-faction conflict that was to have been non-nuclear. However, two rogue actors within /b/ launched nuclear weapons, causing both the mass of members to follow suit and the nominal leader of the alliance, Furseiseki, to disband it. Now pariahs, /b/ spammed the Cyber Nations forums with all manner of shock images to disrupt the game, culminating in a DDoS attack and hack where the home page was defaced and the game's source code stolen. Cyber Nations was down for a number of days, and upon restart my own nation, designated as part of /b/, was stomped into the ground by furious players. The 'disbandment' section on /b/'s official channels read 'many lulz were had, but now we're off TO THE MOON.' Opened to public beta in February 2007, Lunar Wars was a political simulation game that took the broad strokes of Cyber Nations and refined them. Developed by Alessandro Bassi ('Sandro') as a way to teach himself web development, it swiftly attracted players, and offered a new theatre for Anonymous following the dissolution of /b/. I joined up as a junior diplomat for the Elitist Lunar Superstructure on 18/04/07.

The ELS was more disciplined than /b/ from the start. Allied nations were assigned squads to cooperate and trade within, and all announcements were handled through the ELS forum and emailed to members. A greasemonkey script (in 2007, we all used Firefox) was thrown together to assist players. Guides on increasing power quickly were disseminated. Notably two of the admin/developers for the game, skaladis and owl, were ELS members and the recruitment drive across various imageboards was persistent. The IRC channel was anarchic as usual, but diplomats and the leadership convened within a private channel to guide policy. Eph, the alliance leader, designated myself and select others to open lines of communication with smaller groups within the game. Of course, enemies from the days of Cyber Nations had come to the moon.  It seems strange now that 4chan is so identified with reactionary politics, but in these games Anonymous enjoyed bullying the sad little men who named their nations things like 'Wolf Reich ov Iron' and roleplayed as Nazis in their alliances. In Great War III, /b/ had been opposed to Nordreich ('German Nationalists'), and FAN (Federation of Armed Nations), and these groups reemerged on the moon. Leftwing alliances like the Red and Black Block or Union of Lunar Socialist States (ULSS) tried to combat the Nazis on the moon, but the appeal of roleplaying internecine Left political conflicts was limited. To actually wield power capable of slapping down the fascists often meant joining with apolitical, carnivalesque groups like Anonymous. As fun as dunking on fascist cosplay was, however, the real enemy was FARK.

In the ecosystem of the 2007 internet, imageboards were not the only hangout. There were also humour sites like YTMND (You're the Man Now Dog), Something Awful and FARK. The content filtered through to everyone, but allegiance to any one site was performatively over the top. It was as good an excuse as any for enmity.

As a junior diplomat for ELS, I handled treaties with various smaller alliances, most notably the aforementioned ULSS which had been captured by my friend in early May 2007. The tension was mounting palpably across the lunar community as treaties were signed and mutual defence agreements entered into. Something like the network of alliances that ensured the nightmare of World War I was formed, overseen entirely by spotty teenagers and shitposting idiots. Notably GOONS, formed by SomethingAwful forum members, had joined with ELS; FARK was left out in the cold, and allied with FAN. On the night of 19th May 2007 as I stretched my allowed time on the family computer, diplomatic channels became frantic as spies within IRC channels let FARK/FAN know of a planned attack, per ELS internal communications;

GOONS is likely to be attacking FAN within 48 hours. We will receive target lists of anyone GOONS has trouble with. Do not fire counter offensives on FAN unless necessary (problematic targets, etc.)

FARK retaliated by launching the SHIT HITS THE FAN war, beginning perhaps ten minutes after my parents told me to turn the computer off and go to bed. Tossing and turning, I considered diplomatic avenues to strengthen the ELS cause. However as I finally fell into an uneasy sleep the metagame overtook the roleplaying.

For a while now Sandro had been teasing the existence of Galava, a new, more complex browser game with a medieval setting that further developed the gameplay of Lunar Wars. Given that the moon had only been open for a few short months, the kids who had wasted the back half of their school year building alliances on it were grumbling that Lunar Wars was being abandoned before it had even exited beta. The two ELS-allied admin/developers, skaladis and owl were similarly irritated. According to a post by Arciel, head admin of the Lunar Wars forums;

owl had not only given herself nukes; she had given herself and ELS members 9001 nukes each, in reference to a meme. The balance of the game was completely upended; by the time I awoke and booted up the dusty Dell in the spare room Sandro had locked the game. In private conference, Eph and the leadership decided to disband ELS. I was appointed interim Chief Ambassador for the continuity faction, but within a scant few hours I had come around to the joke. Emails continued to go out to rally the faction, but Anonymous' attention, and my own, was shifting elsewhere. The next time I encountered the group, the kids who shut down Habbo Hotel were going up against Scientology.

My friend lost his leadership position in the ULSS after the coup he helped lead was put down. He's involved in actual Leftist politics now, though he's not a Stalinist. In October 2007 Galava was released, and I received an email via the ELS list;

I didn't join. The internet got less wild, more scary. Megaupload was taken down in 2012 and Anonymous initiated a DDoS attack on Universal Music Group. 'Youtuber' became a job, and 4chan birthed the alt right. Both Galava and Lunar Wars continued until October 2009. For me and many others, though, it ended in the atomic fire of 9001 hacked nukes. Anything else was epilogue. The tribute page for Lunar Wars sums it up perfectly;