life lessons from Super Mario

Thanks to Naija twitter person and all round awesome guy @maurice_nn and the perpetually lovely (and yours truly’s girlfriend) @notmutant for the general inspiration for this line of thinking…
Having been an 80s to early 90s child, there are quite a number of things I quite enjoy till now. There’s the cartoons that made sense, the fact that I could go out and play, get dirty and then go home and play video games… 8-bit video games that had random knockoff titles, like Ending Man and such, that were the cutting edge of console gaming. Cheap enough to be bought as a Christmas gift and child-silencer, expensive enough to be shown off to visiting relatives, especially cousins, they were, for lack of a better word, the ish.
And they had life lessons. Fine, you had to dig through a lot of monotonous background muzak and mock gore to get to the lessons, but they were there… Here is a random assortment from Mario. Because he’s a plumber for one, and he’s saving a princess. That’s enough backstory to keep you playing for days on end.

1. Always try to jump over obstacles
There’s blocks, pipes, random spaces in the ground and other things in the way. You could sit there and wait for the time to run out, or you could jump over the obstacle. Sometimes there’s a spring, sometimes there isn’t. Just jump and get over it.

2. Deal with disappointment
Sometimes the princess is just in another castle. Not much you can do about that, save for move on to the next level and continue with the fight…

3. Money will make your life better…
The more the coins you collect, the closer you get to an extra life. More money, less problems. Suck on that, Diddy.

4. Empty space is not always ‘empty’
Empty spaces have stars, for immunity, 1UPs, steps to other levels and other such interesting secrets… Blank walls are often hiding interesting secrets…
Exploring your surroundings will help expand your horizons.

5. Mushrooms are good for you
They make you big and strong… And you can destroy bricks and such. Plus they also come bearing extra lives…

6. You can always start over
No matter how well (or badly) you did the last time, once you get bitten by the vicious plant thing, or an owl, or the turtle, or you get flamed by the dragon, you can always start over.

7. No matter how small you are, you can still jump and get yourself some coins
Even when Mario is a wee little plumber, there’s still some coins he can get. Don’t let your size limit you…

8. Confront your fears. They’ll still be there if you run away
Sometimes the only way to get through to the next level is to attack that Bowser. He’ll still be there when you’re at the end of the level…

9. Use your head
It’s the only way to get coins and power-ups…

10. Keep your eyes on the prize
In the end, the aim is to save the princess. The money and the power are nice, but they’re just there to help you get to the end…

Alright, so these lessons may be inadvertent at best, but they’re a measure of life’s random inadvertent lessons. A plumber with a thing for mushrooms on a quest to save a princess goes level after level, braving lava, water, flying fish, owl creatures, turtles, some boss called Bowser and other such randomness.
That in itself is why Mario is a thousand different kinds of #winning.

temporary insanity, or what hangs out in the dark side of my brain

A second-hand life, living within the lines that have been drawn already, because anything outside the lines is wrong…
The inevitable truth is that we are not the people we want to be, that we have ideals we want to aspire, but with time the ideals are diluted until they are hardly recognizable. Individualism is shunned, because it is in direct conflict with society. It is no longer a society if people do whatever they want, because societies are there for people to belong to, to feel safe in, right?
Wrong.
Individualism is alright as long as it doesn’t show up too prominently. That is how it is sold and packaged, like you can show how much of an individual you are by wearing different colour shoes from everyone else, but that’s about it. When you start thinking different, that is dangerous. You start contributing to the decline of social order. Everyone doing what they want is chaos, it can only lead to trouble, it has to be stopped. The individual cannot think for himself, the individual is there to be thought for, to be used to contribute to the benefit of the group.
That is where conventional wisdom went wrong. Due to its nature, conventional wisdom can often be mistaken for foolishness. Because we all agree to agree does not make something right. The Earth being flat and at the centre of the universe was conventional wisdom for quite a while, it had supporters, people were killed for claiming otherwise, because it was limited to what people could see and hear.
Life as we know it is a series of events designed to destroy the individual and make him dependent on others. That is the essence of society, a sense of belonging. And the sense of belonging is heightened through pointing out and persecuting those that do not belong…
The thing with life is that it always seems original, that at some level we are the first people to do the things we are doing, but usually, unknown to us, someone else has done the exact same thing. Like it or not, we are all living second-hand lives. To make it worse, the things that make us original and unique are suppressed until they are lost, discarded like milk teeth that have to give way to the permanent set. And like molars that show up and hurt like hell, growing up means having to adopt things. Fine, it is alright to be inquisitive as a child, it is part of the learning process, but at some point, the need to know is killed through the idea that all the answers are in education, that knowing what you are supposed to know is secondary to knowing what is true.
Being intelligent is good, as long as that intelligence translates to measurable gain. Having a massive IQ, for instance, and not being able to apply that intelligence in the real world is a drag, conventional wisdom argues, because everything is supposed to benefit the human race. The real world is often designed to melt everyone down to their basic form and cast them in a mould so they can fit in. It’s like having a jigsaw puzzle. The way things should be is that everyone is a unique piece that has points where others attach, while the way things are is that everyone is a complete, one-piece puzzle, or a Rubik’s Cube that’s glued together so the colours don’t mix.
That is why there are no more renaissance men. In the Renaissance, individuals sought to learn more about their world than what was presented to them, that is how there were such interesting combinations as painter/sculptor/lawyer/doctor. The joy of knowing more about the world was more important than what had already been established. But with time came specialization, because individuals would be better suited for a society if they had a purpose. The Renaissance man was abandoned, the specialist became the ideal. Knowing everything about everything became secondary to being the best you can be…
The question remains, are we still individuals or has our fundamental wiring been changed so that we can only survive within a society?

I want my brain back please…

It’s getting harder and harder to think for myself… I have come to realize that my ability to think original, coherent thoughts has waned rather fast. Like now I have become too tired and occupied with getting over the intricacies of life, now I just let everything in…
I’m in a position of responsibility. That in itself means I have to do three people’s work. School’s closed. Add another five people. Budgets to do, emails to send out, sanity to keep… The usual.
And I’m interning. I’m supposed to be doing that now, but nobody’s watching… Cats and mice
I’ve been having interesting, intricate dreams… means I’m getting more REM sleep. Good sign. Like one where my uncles, all five of them, and me, were sitting down for a chat. There were other people I can’t remember. Getting life lessons. Ok, that’s where I was like, is my brain trying to tell me something, like perhaps I need a father figure, or worse, all those ‘getting married’ stories I was getting will come true sooner rather than later…