Grant us eyes

As you once did for the vacuous Rom, grant us eyes, grant us eyes.
Plant eyes on our brains, to cleanse our beastly idiocy.
- Micolash, Host of the Nightmare

One of the weirdest part of becoming a game developer, especially one that does graphics, is the moment you notice that your eyes have changed.

No, I don't (just) mean eye strain from looking at a screen all day. Let me explain.

Acquiring knowledge and professional proficiency means that you learn how things work, how they are made. It means that you learn to look at the finished work differently - if only because you have to be able to spot problems in the output of your own code. So you squint at the way the light bounces off a 3D model, you laugh out loud at a shadow that should be occluded, you raise an eyebrow at flawless anti-aliasing.

It is, in a way, cursed knowledge. Once you have that skill, you can no longer turn it off. Not completely. There is no going back to your old eyes.

What a mess you've been caught up in. And tonight, of all nights.
- Eileen the Crow

I dislike the term "covid cautious". All I am doing is behaving in accordance with the facts. I'd rather we find a word for people who are living in an alternate reality. Those facts, too, feel like cursed knowledge. Impossible to turn off. Impossible to look past.

This is why I routinely say that covid poisons everything. Every potential plan, every new encounter, every social link, every event, every photograph, every happy post online, every interaction outside of the very, very small circles still paying attention. Let's take some examples.

A band I like is in town. Miraculous, for Swedish melodeath to show up in France outside of Paris. I know the venue, I've been there before, though I did not have a CO2 monitor then. I know nobody else will be masking. I'm fairly certain the ventilation sucks. The risk math is terrible. I go anyway - this is not a decision I can rationally defend - and measure above 4000ppm. My GVS Elipse does not leave my face, ever, from start to finish.

I see a cool queer event happening nearby. It'd be nice to go, to meet new people. I know it's not organized by either of the two consistently masked lesbians in town. I know nobody else will be masking. Risk calculus aside, how am I supposed to interact normally with people who are putting me in danger?

I go to an organizing meeting for a collective I belong to. Luckily, the weather's still mild and there's a terrace. We can sit outdoors. We're still not that far from each other, I know none of them pay attention, the risk calculus is not as good as I'd like it to be. I've used nose spray just in case, to nudge the scale a bit. But I get to hang maskless with them for a few hours. It is not lost on me that this makes me human to their eyes, for a change.

I see a call for an event, via one of the too many Signal groups that the Lille queer leftist scene has. It's got a fun hand-drawn poster, it's about raising funds for a good cause. It's an indoors meal in a place that I know has shit ventilation. Once more I wonder why solidarity never seems to extend to people who can't afford to catch a systemic vascular disease that travels through the air.

I briefly ponder joining the hell known as dating or hookup apps. They're bad enough by default, worse when you're queer, worse when you're trans. I wonder how well-received a hard "mask4mask" line would be. What's sexier than starting a date with a swab up your nose, after all? I give up before I even start.

I see a French leftist politician denounce ableism, following the horrific death of a disabled streamer who was being actively tortured by pretend caretakers for the entertainment of a live audience. I remember she argued in favor of letting healthcare staff that doesn't believe in vaccines get back to work. The jokes write themselves. They're not funny.

I want to find a workshop to set up my loom and get back to production weaving. Most of the options are booths in old factories. That means shared air. It's a no-go. I'll somehow need to find a place that is small enough for me to afford on my own.

Coworkers joke about everyone falling ill after a big office party. I did not get sick. I was masked 95% of the time, or outdoors. I say nothing. I'm glad I'm full remote most of the time. I've quietly outed myself as disabled to my teammates, by way of my ridiculous food intolerances. I don't bring up the rest. At least they're not weird about it.

People I respect post a conference selfie. There's no mask in sight. We're mutuals. They've seen me yell, surely. I wonder what their thought process looks like. I can't imagine what it looks like.

But it won't end very nicely, not this time. Even some folks hiding inside are goin' bad.
- Chapel Dweller

A dear friend tells me humans are very bad at risk calculation in one specific case: when the threat is ongoing, long-lasting and has a relatively low baseline probability, wich compounds over time to near-certainty. Such threats break our brains, apparently. It's very simple math, yet we too-often cannot do it.

Some of us can, though. Some of us learned, early or late. Since then we have seen the world differently and it hurts.

Bloodborne is a third-person action game released in 2015 by From Software for the Playstation 4. It initially presents itself as a tale of werewolves and hunters, of one special night: the Hunt is on. It progressively peels away layers to reveal that the plague of beasts itself is the consequence of greater crimes.

As you progress through the game and encounter increasingly unsettling bosses and locations, you acquire Insight. The greater your Insight, the closer you get to the eldritch truth. Creatures previously unseen in the world reveal themselves. It's a neat twist on the old cosmic horror trope, considerably more interesting than a madness gauge.

The greater your Insight, the harder some enemies will hurt. In that regard, cosmic horror gets it wrong: for in the real world, it is your friends and allies who will hit you hardest.

For further reading, see Broken Sociality, a by-now-classic article on the social murder that followed the declared end of the pandemic emergency and "return to normal".