#Thinking either they where wiped out by drowned or maybe drowned just scavenged the cities after something else got them.

[wiseseamonster]

Redesigned my minecraft skin because I wanted to pull from stuff in the game more and had this idea around the ocean ruins and monuments. Maybe this guys people would have been the ones to construct the guardians and stuff like that.

[saints-row-2]

the following is a creative writing ‘essay’ i wrote as part of a class on psychogeography, about Stilwater. i think i linked to this briefly before but i got asked to post it so im posting it now. 

But this Vision Remains Fragmentary

I came to Stilwater five years ago, mostly because I had nothing better to do and nowhere better to be. There were other options; San Andreas, or New Austin, or Los Santos, but I chose to come to Stilwater. On the edge of a lake, in the middle of Michigan, Stilwater is a tiny city that might have been nice forty, fifty years ago. The city has a huge factory district, so I guess it made its money off producing something at some point, but now they’re all closed. It’s a mystery how Stilwater makes any money at all. Most of the city just doesn’t.

Stilwater has always been rife with crime, had a crime family decades old stuck in a war with their younger rivals, tearing the city apart for only yet another gang to slip in through the cracks and monopolise the bits of the city not yet claimed. The three gangs divided Stilwater up into factions and fought hellishly on the boundary lines. Anyone could get caught in the crossfire, and anyone did – the number one cause of death in Stilwater was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It didn’t really matter where you were; the projects in Sunnyvale Gardens amongst the run-down apartment blocks, or the wealthy suburban houses in Tidal Spring, it was all open for invasion.

I came to Stilwater, but most importantly, I came to Saint’s Row. Saint’s Row is a small neighbourhood on the corner of Stilwater, surrounded on two sides by open water. Historically, it has been one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the city, wedged between the Red Light district and the factories and truck yards in Charles Town and Pilsen. It is the wrong place. Long past its prime, half full of empty buildings and half full of homes rotting with people still inside them, Saint’s Row was a desolate place to live. By far the most violent neighbourhood in Stilwater, abandoned to be a failure inside a city that was already suffering. Somehow Saint’s Row never fell under the banner of one gang or another; people fought there, but no one ever claimed it for themselves, the title of ownership rolling around between factions until someone finally decided they’d had enough. It was a shithole, but as my friend Johnny said, it was a shithole with potential.

We were not the only ones who saw the potential inside Saint’s Row. Over five years they rebuilt the neighbourhood from the ground up, stripping out the decaying housing projects, remaking the landscape to form something useful to the people funding the rebuilding, something that the whole city could be proud of. Now it is a thriving centre of business and commerce, every skyscraper a shining beacon of success. The people who used to live in Saint’s Row are gone now, driven out by rising costs and the swift demolition of their homes. But that’s a small price to pay to have a place to put Stilwater’s brand new digital convention centre.

I never saw the rebuilding of Saint’s Row. I spent the transition confined to a hospital bed; left my home the way I had known it and returned to find the place wiped clean, as though the riverbanks had burst and drowned the old neighbourhood. Long ago, when an earthquake struck the Red Light district and caved in a part of the city, they built over it, the old buildings entombed deep below the ground like ancestors’ graves. But the old Saint’s Row is not buried, it is gone, scoured from the face of the Earth.

It wasn’t a safe place to live, a friendly place. I’ve said that well enough; it was dangerous, and it was decaying. Now it’s purified, scrubbed clean and perfect, a glass-coated vision of luxury without a soul and with no homes. I don’t know if having nowhere to live is an improvement over having somewhere unsafe to live. The apartment buildings here are a little out of the price range of the usual tenant of the old Saint’s Row.

I can barely find the street my building used to sit on, let alone revisit my old home. The block where my apartment sat was demolished, and they built a skyscraper on it. It’s a definitely a change from the squat three-floor building I used to rent a ground-floor apartment in.

It was a single room; bedroom, kitchen and living room in one. Hot and cold running gunfire at all hours of the day. It wasn’t anyone’s dream home, especially mine. It was a filthy mess in a block full of graffiti-coated shacks, and was barely able to keep warm in winter and keep out the sound of the street. It did have a garage though, which was a distinct advantage in a city where parking a car on the street is essentially asking for it to get stolen. And it had a beach view, if you stood on the roof, although the last thing you’d really want to do with Saint’s Row’s own Mission Beach was look at it.

The skyscraper that stands there now is like every other new skyscraper in Saint’s Row, a fifty-story art-deco rectangle cluster, with a thousand shining blue windows that are excellent for catching the sun and shining it in your eyes. No matter where you try to hide in Saint’s Row, if the sun is out, there is going to be a skyscraper shining the light right back in your eyes, like a spotlight that detects poor people. There is a huge divide between the old and the new in Stilwater; places like Downtown are an inharmonious mixture of old traditional and the new flash, which is why they have tried to eradicate everything in Saint’s Row that risks breaking outside of their strict template.

The only thing that remains from the old Saint’s Row is the church, and that’s still the greatest loss of them all. The church at the heart of Saint’s Row is white, like bleached bones picked clean by scavengers. The inside is gilded with gold and lined with oak floors, but it looks and feels like a rich man’s tomb. You can spend a million dollars to make a grave beautiful, but it still holds nothing but the dead. They call it the Saint’s Row Memorial Church now – it was just the Church before, it didn’t need a name to hold reverence – and claim it is a testament to the city’s tumultuous past.

When it was the place me and my friends haunted like violent ghosts, it was collapsing in on itself. The grey stone that the church was built out of was plastered in so many layers of graffiti that though it could have been white underneath, but you would never be able to tell. The pillars inside that held the second story were crumbling, the stairs to the upper floor torn out a long time ago. Most of the pews were gone too, only a few left, the wood black with rot. The graffiti that coated the walls was like a mural to the history of the neighbourhood, every gang and gangster that rolled through in the last forty years had made their mark on it. It was alive, with the people inside and with our love for the place. People died to protect that church. I fought tooth and nail to keep it ours. It was a crumbling ruin, but we were proud of it.

The memorialisation feels like mockery. What are they trying to memorialise? What has been lost is not theirs to mourn. The church was ours and they took it from us, and they have the gall to say that they lost something in the years that we were the ones occupying it. It was our right! To take what we had and defend our neighbourhood, that was our right. No one else was trying to look after the place, the police and the city officials had long since given up on the Row.

The Church sits now in the shadow of the Phillips Building, a goliath of a black and orange skyscraper that dominates the Stilwater skyline. The Phillips Building is the Ultor headquarters, and they want to make sure you can always see them. They funded the rebuilding of the Row, and they want to make everyone know it. The road leading up to the Church is four lanes wide and lined on either side with flags showing off the Stilwater city crest alongside the Ultor company logo, as if the two are halves of the same coin. Ultor billboards are all over the neighbourhood, branding their mark into every inch of the place so you can never dare to forget it. A BRIGHTER FUTURE AND A BETTER LIFE, their slogan claims. The future they’ve built is definitely brighter – it’s so dazzlingly bright that I’m blinded. Or maybe that’s just from the rage.

The Church was sacrosanct not because it was holy; it was an ordinary building, we the children played in it, we can hardly claim the refurbishment was an act of iconoclasm. It was precious because of what it meant to us. I wonder sometimes what happened to the bodies in the graveyard. Were they moved, to the bigger graveyard in the north of the city, next to the rich people’s suburban mansions? Or were they just paved over, buried under layers of concrete and tarmac, like the underground buildings in the Red Light district? It feels more egregious than the other crimes, even if we had little respect for the graveyard ourselves. People used to have fights out there, in ritualistic bonding activities, and half the gravestones were broken from our own bullets.

I say ‘people’ like I wasn’t one of them, and Johnny didn’t once nearly kick my teeth in out there amongst the tombstones. That kind of thing just felt natural in Saint’s Row. It probably doesn’t make sense to outsiders. It doesn’t make sense now they overthrew the neighbourhood and made it into something hollow, and empty. I couldn’t imagine behaving that way in the courtyard of the Memorial Church, our behaviour turned into something unwanted and vile, a blight on their glass paradise.

The change in Stilwater was less natural progression and more a like a sudden neon-clad viral infestation, eating through the bones of the city and making it flourish into hideous impractical new growths. You can stand on the river opposite Saint’s Row, on the pier in Downtown, and it very nearly looks pretty at night. When it’s too dark to make out the buildings themselves, all you can see is the sweeping orange spotlights around the leviathan Phillips Building, the way the millions of glass windows reflect in the river, and it looks nice. Certainly, better than it’s ever looked in the past. In the light of day, the old city looks grimy and unpleasant, the ugly practicality of the old architecture awful in contrast to Ultor’s garish new renovations. I’d say you can understand why someone would want to remodel the rest of Stilwater, but I’d be caught dead before I was seen sympathising with Ultor.

Saint’s Row is pretty from the outside, from the faraway side of the river, but it’s worthless within. There’s nothing worth reclaiming, and even if we called it ours, it never would be again. Beauty, when it does not hold the promise of happiness, has no right to exist, but we can’t tear down the billboards, the skyscrapers, the Phillips Building and find what we used to own beneath the shell. The Saint’s Row we called home is gone. Five years ago, we started in the Row and grew outwards. It was a struggle, but it was a war we were willing to wage. Now we are forever outside Saint’s Row looking in. It is a white void of land that is untouched and untouchable by the likes of us.