Carbon Operator

Grasshopper Manufacture has posted a game and level design position. If I knew the Unreal Editor and thought for a second I could cope with my head constantly wanting to explode trying to process non-Romance syntax I’d be on it in a heartbeat.

This probably isn’t going to turn into a “where I was when Obama got elected” type event especially because the answer will almost always be “glued to the set” (or less commonly “petting a Canadian for luck” if you were in Austin); but we’ve had some laughs over grand declarations in our game industy scene over the past week, explained here and here.

As of this post, “crackpot team of investigative journalists” still stands, but the crow has been eaten (edit: kind of — well, not really).

All links SFW, possible funny accents.

When the undending cable news coverage of the Columbine school massacre started on April 20, 1999, the most obvious explanation was held up as the correct one — “kids pushed over the edge by school bullying take revenge.” It was an appealing story to some of us who drew those connections with ease, having suffered the kind of abuse at the hands of our classmates that could be the only possible explanation for being motivated to do such a thing. With the dribs and drabs of information we were getting despite the constant news feed that day, eveything made sense though the lens of our own experiences. In an essay I wrote at university on The Hour of the Furnaces, I stated that sometimes the need for a text alone is enough to justify its creation. When the paper came back from being marked by the professor that particular statement had been underlined.

In my prepubescent years I had been like so many others sitting on my bed with my undershirt pulled halfway on, my face swollen and chest soaked in tears, screaming that I didn’t want to go to school that day. A few years later I came up with a less confrontational tack, and begged off school sick for roughly half of the year. The stress brought on by my treatment at the hands of my classmates was so bad that my illness actually did resemble a respiratory condition, until I answered one of the doctor’s questions in a way I shouldn’t have, and the screaming battle started all over again.

If any of us were spoken to about the problem back then, it was usually to be told that it was the law of the jungle, and to just suck it up and deal with it. Upon hearing the news of the massacre, I can imagine that a lot of us grinned too widely as we tried to swallow our schadenfreude knowing that someone had taken the message to heart and followed it to its logical but unintended conclusion. There wasn’t even going to be a trial because the killers had turned the guns on themselves. That was a grand lie we were told — “you can’t run away from your problems.” As many of us learned in our adult lives sometimes running away really is all it takes, but the people who could have made the call often left us to rot in the name of teaching us some sort of valuable life lesson, and for the sake of not offending their own notions of correct martyrdom and grace under pressure.

After the firsthand accounts, wipespread confusion, camera-crowding and constant running projections were put aside, and a municipal cover-up had run its course, the research of many over the intervening years, wrapped up nicely in Dave Cullen’s excellent “Columbine” has concluded that the great schoolyard massacre that was Columbine was an act of domestic terrorism. It wasn’t about the shaken and ticking social pressure cooker that is high school, it was about Oklahoma City. There were seven bombs, and possibly an eighth, discovered undetonated in and around the school. The killers’ journals revealed that they felt they were performing, essentially, an act of the superior extinguishing the inferior. They were acting as Leopold and Loeb with extinction ambitions and better ordnance.

Easily the most poignant comment on Columbine I had seen up until reading the book was a Tom the Dancing Bug comic that boldly proclaimed “teenage ink blot goes on massive killing spree” with several talking torsos around the edges of the single panel blaming among other things bullying, violence on TV, and the moral relativism brought on by the Internet; but it appears that I can no longer hold Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold up as despicable hero figures to the swollen, wet and crumbling school age girl that I once was. I have had to fold up my vindication of an indefensible youth and put it in the files alongside my tax returns, credit card statements and other trappings of adulthood I couldn’t even imagine back in those days, because it’s just a blot of ink that someone else underlined.