CW: This is a Eulogy piece so there's talks about Death and the world, but Eulogies are hurt by spoiling them too much even in CWs. So please just read responsibly and know I'm not going to bring up anything intensely triggering in subject matter. If you get outraged or upset, things I try to CW in advance of, in this case thats the point. I will be talking about Suicide Statistics and the Pandemic though.
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"Advertised both in this game and the original is a series of 3 failed kickstarter campaigns which, distressingly enough, is still up despite the original creator's death. On top of this, both of the current games he has up on Gamejolt are free, and the kickstarters are about making faithful 'remakes' of these for a pitifully small amount of money." - Erato Heti, Presentable Liberty Insight emphasis my own.
This game is never coming out, at least not by Wertpol. That said I think there's something almost painfully important about a game that will never come out to remain on here. It marks a crucial gravestone of the unfound aspiration of the young artist. If works like "Portrait of The Artist By a Young Man" reflect the process of the bohemian in the unsteady early phases before reaching a point of actualization (in Joyce's later fiction like Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake both considered to be the greatest in the western canon). Then its in works like these, like Presentable Liberty, No Longer Human, and The Bell Jar that are important to telling the other side of that story of the plights of the young artist and thinker. The story of a life cut short.
Originally I wasn't even going to talk about this, even though I knew it was on here, as I was afraid that by mentioning its here the memorial itself would be ripped away. I thought that even rating it and giving attention to it at all would get it destroyed by the site moderators or by IGDBs content system. I don't care anymore, it's still here months later, and its still been ignored. If that does happen, it'll reflect a deep truth, the systems of artistic memory don't want you to remember the failed project, they desperately want you to forget that it was even tried.
It's important, at least to me, that people didn't know that this existed for so long. This whole textual eulogy, to a man I don't know, reeks of pretentiousness, or at least pretension. Of setting myself, some loser critic that uses a website too much, to speak so highly of a work. To compare it to the literary works of Plath and Joyce? Not only is that patently ridiculous as the game isn't that good, but also who the fuck am I to even be doing that?
But, and you have to excuse me, that's exactly it, I'm just some nobody. We all are nobodies in the cruel grip of future-time, none of us are really immortalized, some can just delay how long it is until we are forgotten, for a little longer, but none of us are so immortal as we think after death...
On the other hand to, there also the fact the most people are on a razor's edge with the expression of their early work. Joyce almost lost portrait in a fire, because he almost threw it away in there, his family fetched it out for him so the story goes. Of course these early works aren't perfect, of course they are unrefined. It doesn't take all that much to convince anybody they are worthless.
A casual friend of mine on a rotting social platform once reflected something to the effect that she was sad about all the games that haven't gotten made, and that she thinks about that a lot. I mused, naively, that this is "a humbling reminder i think." and that stuff like the pandemic, and global warming are 'background stories' in the world stage. privately I recall thinking something to the effect of seeing it as regretting all the aborted babies that were never born but I guess I never said that part to her. I might have also incorrectly convinced her I was right or that it was too sentimental to post publicly...I feel so bad for causing that now that I look back it, her reflection would have been so useful here and now I'm isolated with the thought with nobody else to quote off of. Who even tries to talk about the art unfinished, because the author behind them is dead?
It's hard to even say that sort of naivete is wrong. In fact, it's deeply useful to living an unperturbed life to ignore it for the most part. In the same way ignoring the existence of the cemetary in your town is a real plot of land taken up...important to try and put it out of your mind.
It's also important for the nation state to under report or ignore death causes to, especially ones that could have been prevented. I played Presentable Liberty during the pandemic and connected the concerns of work to what I saw as "The Party of Death", the party, not of any one political party affiliation mind you, that's able to capitalize on Death itself, and use it to keep their engine going. I believe now, part of that is in obscuring the numbers as best possible, until its too late:
"With the latest COVID-19 deaths reported to WHO now exceeding 3.3 million, based on the excess mortality estimates produced for 2020, we are likely facing a significant undercount of total deaths directly and indirectly attributed to COVID-19."
Excess Mortality is the way of finding out the true number of deaths by comparing to what it was before an event has happened. This is how was know also, that during a recession, suicide rates usually spike, from 1999 to 2007, a study titled INCREASE IN STATE SUICIDE RATES IN THE USA DURING ECONOMIC RECESSION found in the results that:
"A one percentage point rise in unemploy-
ment is associated with a 0.99% increase in the suicide rate
([0.60, 1.38], p < 0.0001), which is closer to the association
estimated when there were no labour market protections
(1·06%)"
Source:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(12)61910-2/fulltext
It's not meta-data per say, so much as just analyzing public statistics within a specific period of time. The idea that suicides go up with a recession is a powerful point in the statistical imagination. I say that because the metadata over a long time, century say, it doesn't exist. At least, not to my knowledge.
Let me complicate it even more: this paranoia about recessions and death became very transparent to the Party of Death as a political tool that may have used it as a tool to invoke more death. The idea is great in our public conciousness of the time, the argument that the economy should be opened up because people are going to die from issues other than sickness, like say depression or unemployment. This is in spite of the fact that suicide actually went down during the pandemic. In a study called Changes in Suicide Rates — United States, 2018–2019 it was found that, contrary to our expectations of recessions "From 2018 to 2019, the overall suicide rate declined for the first time in over a decade." and, more specifically:
"In 2019, a total of 47,511 deaths were attributable to suicide. From 2018 to 2019, the overall suicide rate declined significantly by 2.1% (14.2 per 100,000 population to 13.9) (Table); among females, the rate declined by 3.2% (6.2 to 6.0) and among males by 1.8% (22.8 to 22.4)."
One thing we do know though is that, suicide is preventable, but what does it mean to be preventable? Well, it means that it's preventable by how societies are structured, same article:
"Research has shown that suicide is preventable and that risks for suicide extend beyond mental health and lack of access to mental health treatment alone (7). Suicide prevention must focus on the constellation of associated factors, including mental illness, substance misuse, high conflict or violent relationships, social isolation, job and financial problems, lack of community connectedness, barriers to suicide-related care, and access to lethal means among persons at risk."
Suicide is preventable, but not at all merely by the 'strong will' of individuals. One does not 'think' away a barrel in the mouth from going off, either it goes off or it doesn't.
Society, in particular the negligence of the machine of neglect in the 2000s, it killed this man and many like him, as suicide went up 33% over the course of the 2000s. Then, it turned around and killed millions in pandemic neglect. Both are dead, both were filled with many 'artists' and people, and family, and everything else that one can fit in the labels of a human body. The most important of all though, is 'nobody'.
It will probably kill again.
Keep an eye on that Excess Mortality number. Check in on death trends, and who's dying and who isnt. Don't let The Party of Death keep this information out of your mind for too long, that's how they like it. Rest in peace Wertpol, you were able to illuminate a truth about economic reality.
In Memoriam, Wertpol
-----------------------------------------------------------
"Advertised both in this game and the original is a series of 3 failed kickstarter campaigns which, distressingly enough, is still up despite the original creator's death. On top of this, both of the current games he has up on Gamejolt are free, and the kickstarters are about making faithful 'remakes' of these for a pitifully small amount of money." - Erato Heti, Presentable Liberty Insight emphasis my own.
This game is never coming out, at least not by Wertpol. That said I think there's something almost painfully important about a game that will never come out to remain on here. It marks a crucial gravestone of the unfound aspiration of the young artist. If works like "Portrait of The Artist By a Young Man" reflect the process of the bohemian in the unsteady early phases before reaching a point of actualization (in Joyce's later fiction like Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake both considered to be the greatest in the western canon). Then its in works like these, like Presentable Liberty, No Longer Human, and The Bell Jar that are important to telling the other side of that story of the plights of the young artist and thinker. The story of a life cut short.
Originally I wasn't even going to talk about this, even though I knew it was on here, as I was afraid that by mentioning its here the memorial itself would be ripped away. I thought that even rating it and giving attention to it at all would get it destroyed by the site moderators or by IGDBs content system. I don't care anymore, it's still here months later, and its still been ignored. If that does happen, it'll reflect a deep truth, the systems of artistic memory don't want you to remember the failed project, they desperately want you to forget that it was even tried.
It's important, at least to me, that people didn't know that this existed for so long. This whole textual eulogy, to a man I don't know, reeks of pretentiousness, or at least pretension. Of setting myself, some loser critic that uses a website too much, to speak so highly of a work. To compare it to the literary works of Plath and Joyce? Not only is that patently ridiculous as the game isn't that good, but also who the fuck am I to even be doing that?
But, and you have to excuse me, that's exactly it, I'm just some nobody. We all are nobodies in the cruel grip of future-time, none of us are really immortalized, some can just delay how long it is until we are forgotten, for a little longer, but none of us are so immortal as we think after death...
On the other hand to, there also the fact the most people are on a razor's edge with the expression of their early work. Joyce almost lost portrait in a fire, because he almost threw it away in there, his family fetched it out for him so the story goes. Of course these early works aren't perfect, of course they are unrefined. It doesn't take all that much to convince anybody they are worthless.
A casual friend of mine on a rotting social platform once reflected something to the effect that she was sad about all the games that haven't gotten made, and that she thinks about that a lot. I mused, naively, that this is "a humbling reminder i think." and that stuff like the pandemic, and global warming are 'background stories' in the world stage. privately I recall thinking something to the effect of seeing it as regretting all the aborted babies that were never born but I guess I never said that part to her. I might have also incorrectly convinced her I was right or that it was too sentimental to post publicly...I feel so bad for causing that now that I look back it, her reflection would have been so useful here and now I'm isolated with the thought with nobody else to quote off of. Who even tries to talk about the art unfinished, because the author behind them is dead?
It's hard to even say that sort of naivete is wrong. In fact, it's deeply useful to living an unperturbed life to ignore it for the most part. In the same way ignoring the existence of the cemetary in your town is a real plot of land taken up...important to try and put it out of your mind.
It's also important for the nation state to under report or ignore death causes to, especially ones that could have been prevented. I played Presentable Liberty during the pandemic and connected the concerns of work to what I saw as "The Party of Death", the party, not of any one political party affiliation mind you, that's able to capitalize on Death itself, and use it to keep their engine going. I believe now, part of that is in obscuring the numbers as best possible, until its too late:
"With the latest COVID-19 deaths reported to WHO now exceeding 3.3 million, based on the excess mortality estimates produced for 2020, we are likely facing a significant undercount of total deaths directly and indirectly attributed to COVID-19."
Excess Mortality is the way of finding out the true number of deaths by comparing to what it was before an event has happened. This is how was know also, that during a recession, suicide rates usually spike, from 1999 to 2007, a study titled INCREASE IN STATE SUICIDE RATES IN THE USA DURING ECONOMIC RECESSION found in the results that:
"A one percentage point rise in unemploy-
ment is associated with a 0.99% increase in the suicide rate
([0.60, 1.38], p < 0.0001), which is closer to the association
estimated when there were no labour market protections
(1·06%)"
Source:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(12)61910-2/fulltext
It's not meta-data per say, so much as just analyzing public statistics within a specific period of time. The idea that suicides go up with a recession is a powerful point in the statistical imagination. I say that because the metadata over a long time, century say, it doesn't exist. At least, not to my knowledge.
Let me complicate it even more: this paranoia about recessions and death became very transparent to the Party of Death as a political tool that may have used it as a tool to invoke more death. The idea is great in our public conciousness of the time, the argument that the economy should be opened up because people are going to die from issues other than sickness, like say depression or unemployment. This is in spite of the fact that suicide actually went down during the pandemic. In a study called Changes in Suicide Rates — United States, 2018–2019 it was found that, contrary to our expectations of recessions "From 2018 to 2019, the overall suicide rate declined for the first time in over a decade." and, more specifically:
"In 2019, a total of 47,511 deaths were attributable to suicide. From 2018 to 2019, the overall suicide rate declined significantly by 2.1% (14.2 per 100,000 population to 13.9) (Table); among females, the rate declined by 3.2% (6.2 to 6.0) and among males by 1.8% (22.8 to 22.4)."
One thing we do know though is that, suicide is preventable, but what does it mean to be preventable? Well, it means that it's preventable by how societies are structured, same article:
"Research has shown that suicide is preventable and that risks for suicide extend beyond mental health and lack of access to mental health treatment alone (7). Suicide prevention must focus on the constellation of associated factors, including mental illness, substance misuse, high conflict or violent relationships, social isolation, job and financial problems, lack of community connectedness, barriers to suicide-related care, and access to lethal means among persons at risk."
Suicide is preventable, but not at all merely by the 'strong will' of individuals. One does not 'think' away a barrel in the mouth from going off, either it goes off or it doesn't.
Society, in particular the negligence of the machine of neglect in the 2000s, it killed this man and many like him, as suicide went up 33% over the course of the 2000s. Then, it turned around and killed millions in pandemic neglect. Both are dead, both were filled with many 'artists' and people, and family, and everything else that one can fit in the labels of a human body. The most important of all though, is 'nobody'.
It will probably kill again.
Keep an eye on that Excess Mortality number. Check in on death trends, and who's dying and who isnt. Don't let The Party of Death keep this information out of your mind for too long, that's how they like it. Rest in peace Wertpol, you were able to illuminate a truth about economic reality.
In Memoriam, Wertpol