#biasfuzzball

[bagog]

biasfuzzball replied to your post: FW:FW:RE: Customer 37′s Julias

Customer37, keeping it classy as always, eh?

I spend a lot of time thinking about classy, classy Customer 37 just so I can write about them once a year for 500 words...

[bagog]

biasfuzzball replied to your post:

                   @mshenkowithoutadoubt tagged me AGES ago to talk...          

   Not seen Fantastic Beasts and probably won’t get around to it… but I have to ask. what was the worst movie you ever saw in a theatre?   

Twas Green Lantern. A movie I was very excited about that ended up being a CGI RomCom. I used my first and only day off in 9 weeks to go see it.

[biasfuzzball]

Well, it turns out that the bus I commute on has a very different schedule to the one I believed it ran on. Apparently every second journey heads out here to the other side of the city. Frankly I'm amazed this hasn't been an issue until now. Oh, and it turns out that I have a week, maybe two, to find another job. Wonder if anywhere out here is hiring..?

[bagog]

biasfuzzball replied to your post: Coming Out - What Happens to Who You Were

This is a familiar situation. I know I rationalised away teenage crushes, but for a long time I decided that I would simply not envision a future shared with anyone. A lovely simple solution that worked perfectly until it really didn’t.

Absolutely, that’s exactly what I did, as well. Told myself “I’m not cut out for a relationship, I don’t want one at all.” That felt like a super power for a long time. Suddenly, I realized I did want a relationship, and then I felt like I was screwed.

[bagog]

Totally agree with you on the distant epilogue thing. I'm kind of torn between two endings overall, and one of the two that are my favourites is the one where you reject all the options offered and the next cycle sorts it out. As you say, by the time you get to the point where you even have those choices, you're the big hero whatever you choose or don't, and its about what that means to you... Anyway, questions... How about 18?

I also like the idea of the refusal ending, and the idea that you could be a hero without being THE ONE who stops the Reapers. I like how immensely morally conflicted that ending is... since it carries the moral implications of the Destroy ending to their full conclusion. Ahhhh. Anyhoo, 18:18. Paragon or Renegade and why?Paragon, pretty much. Sometimes this was my own personal way of viewing the world, sometimes it was because... the Renegade options skew wildly from ‘responding with a gruff voice’ to ‘murdering someone in cold blood’ and I don’t like that unpredictability. There are a few Renegade interrupts that are no brainers to me and must be selected, and a couple times the Paragon responses are too naive, but otherwise. Paragon.

[bagog]

biasfuzzball replied to your post : Some nights it is the biggest, most depressing...

Yeah, those stories kind of… touch a nerve. And, I’d read the series of essays. The issue has been on my mind a bit lately as well.

Thanks, I think I will actually post them in October? Seems like a great way to vent and lose followers at the same time...

[bagog]

biasfuzzball replied to your post: tagged by sebastianstuns, sorry it took me so long...

I was at the pub the other night with some friends, and everyone was so angry about the new Google logo. I’ve never seen such a fuss about typography… I mean, its not as if it was Comic Sans.

I am not a fan... I like serifs. I guess ‘G’ has always been such a trustworthy letter, and the way it looks in the new logo seems suspicious... shady. But I was attempting to prove to a coworker that this is the first sans serif iteration. 

[bagog]

One Mountain, Forever.

ALL REQUEST AUGUST!

biasfuzzball requested “something with mountains in? Any setting, fandom or background, just needs mountains.”

Yeah, I know it’s not August anymore. blah blah blah, I suck, it’s indefensible. So you know me and stories about death...

+++

He died, what felt like forever ago. His purgatory was a mountain.

He was asked--he remembered what he was asked, though the sound of the voice or who’s voice it was he would never remember--to choose a mountain from his memory. He’d climb this mountain forever... or what would feel like forever, anyway. Purgatory was the eternity of toil to work up to an eternity of bliss in Paradise. 

He would starve and thirst and sweat... the mountain paths were an allegorical maze of the worst sins of his life. At the end of the journey, The Angel would come down from the clouds and collect you. Some people chose the tallest mountain to be closer to the heavens at the end. Some tried to be clever and chose the shortest they could think of. Some penitent souls let the voice choose for them. But everyone got one mountain, forever. How could he not choose Illiniza? 

He knew mountains, he loved hiking, he had never had a better climb than Illiniza. If there was a mountain he had to climb forever, it could be Illiniza. There was a certain defiance to the action, too, which he considered as he stood atop one of Illiniza’s two peaks.  The landscape before him was an unfathomable expanse of mountains: every hue and size and shape imaginable, stretching out to a horizon that did not bow. He had seen a peak here and there as he climbed, but the way the paths twisted and trapped you against a snowpack had kept his eyes on his feet. Hunger and fatigue of listless millennia had made him stumble along. And there was the loneliness.

He reached the summit what must have been weeks ago, and the view still left him gobsmacked. Mountains of absurdly conflicting ecologies with roots twined together beneath shadowed, impenetrable valleys of fog. Off to his right, the red and jagged peaks of some Rocky Mountain transplant, so sharp it seemed to crumble before his eyes as it split the the clouds that wandered overhead. 

Further in the distance was a snow-capped summit--a cartoon of a mountain, practically--deep vein-purple and sloped with a slope that was practically concave. At this distance, the sides seemed impossible smooth. The treeline girded the foot of the mountain: the faintest hint of green fading to solid rock.

And all around him at lower elevations there were the low weathered humps of ancient mountains, no more than hills at his present height. Naked trees--cold and early fall or hot winter dried branches--enveloped the mountain from foot to peak like a shadow.

Once in a while he saw The Angel come for someone, lifting them to Paradise in a shaft of pure gold. Each time, it was so distant that it seemed a single blonde hair snaked down from the clouds and blew away on the winter wind. Then the mountain would submerge itself beneath the fog.

It was Dante who had conceived of Purgatory as a single giant mountain. He had always liked that Comedy. But expeditions with crowds were awful, and if it were possible, he was happy at first to find Purgatory so lonely. But, perhaps it was only his Purgatory that was a mountainous waste. Maybe someone else on one of those other peaks saw all this as... a forest... or a highway... or as a single mountain of Dante-esque torments. Perhaps they saw him waiting in some ironic trap. In someone else’s view, he might not be alone, but simply ignorant.

He knew that often the angel often made it’s supplicant’s wait (patience, too, was a lesson Purgatory taught), and so he had waited when he reached the ‘summit’ of his chosen mountain.

But, in his gut, he knew no one was coming for him. He had requested a single mountain that was two mountains--hoping to spend eternity smug with a technicality exploited. He had ascended the taller of the two peaks, even, as if to assure there were no hard feelings. But now, standing atop Illiniza Norte, he knew that salvation was on the shorter peak. But Illiniza Sur was a travesty of a climb... and the thought of wandering back through the winding trails then back up a more difficult peak destroyed him. It would all have been better if he could determine for himself why he had chosen Illiniza in the first place: was it because of his fond memories, or his desire to get the better of the afterlife?

In Dante, the mountain of Purgatory was formed by the impact of a fallen Lucifer slamming into the opposite side of the world. The flat horizon, then, was full of the grave markers of a million personal devils. Illiniza was one mountain with two peaks, and he wondered for eternity how many devils had plummeted down to create it.