Against Death

Every video I create
every photo I shoot
every poem I write
is a bullet fired
in a war against death
that I will inevitably lose.

But just because you’re on the losing side
doesn’t mean it’s the wrong side.

What is a video
but a fever dream?

What is a camera
if not a time machine?

What is a photo
if not your beloved
frozen in amber?

What is a poem
if not a perpetual motion machine,
a story told and told
and told again?

This is how people defy physics
and transform into pure light.

The Irish say
the final death you die
is the last time someone
speaks your name.

If that’s true, I hope my voice
echoes your syllables
off the azure arched ceiling of sky
for eternity.

This is stupid and it’ll never work.
I can only scream for so long,
and this clock someday winds down
and ends up in the landfill of time.

But the way my wife’s cheek feels
beneath my palm,
I want to believe
that softness
will never vanish from the earth.

I want to believe that “alone”
is just a temporary condition.

I can’t believe in god
so this is where
I pour all my faith.

This is a foolish dream
as all dreams are foolish.

And beautiful.

Kevin Reitz, 1998.

Maybe you only live
as long as your heart
remains a child.

Jung Chin, 2003.

I hope my cynicism
does not kill me
long before it decides
to cease its beating.

Lily Chin-Woo, 2013.

Maybe this
is the only death
I can refuse
and if so, I will find a way
to make it sufficient.

Hung Yoo Chin, 2015.

I don’t want the earth to forget us.

You, someday.

I don’t want the earth to forget us.

Me, someday soon.

So let’s remember together.

Death has made us all
into hand grenades,
and to love anyone
is to pull the pin
and hug your own murder
tight to your chest.

How noble
to fight the war
you know you cannot win
but refuse to ignore.

How noble
to not go gently

to rage
and in doing so,
become the light.

Dr. Piratelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Craft Patches

I was psyched when the Mean Streets of Gadgetzan was announced. Finally, we would see some relief from the endless cavalcade of midrange Shaman decks – a phenomenon that was only worsened by the Yogg-Saron nerfs and One Night in Karazhan. If I saw one more Thunder Bluff Valiant hit the table, I was going to craft a real Spell Damage totem out of driftwood and fling it through Ben Brode’s office window.

The previews looked deeply promising. Shaman didn’t look like it was getting much good stuff, and other archetypes were getting buffed up nicely (Go, Dragon Priest, go!). Patches flew right by me. My response was basically: “Oh, so Stonetusk Boar is legendary now, eh? Nice. Are you guys running out of ideas?”

How much difference could a 1/1 on turn one make?

It makes a whole damn lot of difference, as it turns out. And people weren’t happy about it.

I was one of those people. Playing against Pirate Warrior over and over was bad enough, but the bigger problem was the metagame response to this deck. Since aggro was suddenly so effective, many control archetypes flew out the window faster than you could scream, “AVAST!” (My only consolation is that Patches was now gleefully humping midrange Shaman’s bloated corpse while singing drunken sea shanties.)

Even non-pirate Warrior decks sped up and focused on those critical first four to six turns. It wasn’t enough for Pirates to be fast – now the whole game felt like it had gone on a meth binge at Heisenberg’s lab (Editor’s Note: 2013 called, it wants its Breaking Bad references back. (Justin’s Note: 2008 called, it wants its jokes back.))

I deeply resist anything that’s popular. Maybe it’s my history as a teenage goth and the accompanying aversion to whatever the cool kids are doing (though, really, there are no cool kids playing Hearthstone – just people who beat me in Ranked). Isn’t playing a mathematically superior deck like cutting yourself an unearned break? Sure, you can get to the top of the mountain in a helicopter, but hiking makes you a better person, right?

So I gravitated toward infinite golem Druid decks, Kazakus Mage decks, Finja Murloc decks, and Grime decks (and played them aggro, which is hilariously incorrect. January Justin is pointing and laughing at December Justin who is stupid.). Anything but Pirate Warrior decks. “I can’t take the EASY way out! Fifteen year old Justin thinks you’re just trying to be POPULAR and BORING!”

However, the more time I spent playing against Patches decks, the more I came to admire their fast, brutal gameplay. If dragon Priest is rapiers at dawn in powdered wigs, pirate Warrior is 3 AM prison shanks while wearing chicken suits. And truthfully, I like to win. And Patches (and his tentacle monster toothbrush shank) wins. (And fifteen year old Justin didn’t pay his own rent, so screw that kid.) I got rolled over by this deck enough times that I decided that in order to beat ‘em, I had to join ‘em.

So I crafted Patches. Immediately, my pirate Warrior deck’s win-loss ratio improved. In a best case scenario, Patches can score me an additional 2-3 points of damage per game, and in an aggro deck, that’s significant. And unlike other decks, which often provide longer games, pirate Warrior wins or loses extremely quickly. If you make a bad call, you know exactly which choice killed you, because you only made 15-20 choices in the entire game, which probably didn’t even reach turn eight.

I can’t stress enough how important that is for new players. One of the problems with any form of competitive gaming, from fighting games to first person shooters to collectible card games, is a lack of connection between actions and results. It’s not always easy to draw straight lines between your in-game choices (in deck building and play) and how it results in your victory or death. Limiting the number of choices made by beginner players can help them identify and correct their mistakes.

One of the things that really intrigues me about pirate Warrior is how it forces you to think about playing for damage, tempo, value, and weight. Since it’s an aggro deck, you’re always trying to power through your opponent’s life total with cards like Southsea Deckhand, Small-Time Buccaneer, and the occasional lucky Bloodsail Raider. Playing for damage is the default setting for this deck, and there’s something that feels really damn great about murdering your way through your opponent’s life total in five short turns.

Understanding how to play for value is almost as important as the relentless drive for damage. In most decks, your 1-3 mana drops are merely there to buy you time to hit your 4 drops and combos. In pirate Warrior, those tiny minions are your path to victory, and losing them hurts. You have to get as much value out of these tiny minions as you possibly can, because chances are, you’re not going to get many chances to replace them – if the game goes past turn eight, you’re probably dead. Each one of those pirates needs to carve off a significant amount of enemy health while helping you maintain a dominant board state.

Speaking of board state, judging and responding to tempo is clutch too. Even weaker board clears like Consecration, Maelstrom Portal, and Whirlwind are day-ruiners. While “DON’T HOLD BACK!” is the default strategy for Pirate Warrior, you have to constantly evaluate board state and know when to sacrifice a pirate or your own life points to maintain favorable tempo. And if your opponent is coming up on the mana total for a board clear, you may want to keep a pirate or two in your hand instead of playing them and exposing them to harm.

In this deck, your pirates were born to die, so they have virtually no weight. Each one needs to spend their short, brutish lives working hard. If someone drops a Twilight Guardian or Sen’jin Shieldmaster, you’re forced to choose between burning a weapon attack and life points or burning two or (ugh) three of your precious pirates to clear the way for that delicious damage waterfall. Playing for weight is very difficult, but if you’re forced into that situation, you have to be flawless. This deck tolerates no bad decisions.

Mastering these four skills is essential to improving your overall Hearthstone win ratio. Even if you hate Patches, and you’d lock an Australian in a trunk for playing this deck, you may want to be a hypocrite and play it for yourself, for all of the valuable lessons it can teach you. Worst case scenario, Patches eats a neft, and you dust his slimy ass for 1600 dust. If you received him in a pack, kudos! You came out way ahead on dust / gold. If you crafted him, now you can go craft something else. You have nothing to lose but your gothy self-imposed chains.

And for me, a guy who sees every game as one giant punching simulator, it feels awesome to completely ignore your opponent’s first few rounds worth of minions while smashing their life totals.“Nice Murlocs. Now pardon me while I beat your face in! AVAAAST!”

(Pro tip: watch the hell out for dragon Priest when you’re playing pirate Warrior. They have board clears (Holy Nova, Dragonfire Potion), spot removal (Shadow Words), extremely high value low cost creatures (Twilight Whelp, Wyrmrest Agent, and Netherspite Historian) and excellent mid level creatures (Blackwing Corruptor, Blackwing Technician, Azure Drake, Drakonid Operative). And the Priest hero ability combined with Kabal Talonpriest has the capacity to keep taunters in play and life totals high and extend the game past your deck’s stamina. Priest is even better at maximizing value in this meta, and that’s awful for pirate Warrior players. Pirates versus ninjas is an argument. Pirates versus dragons is a slaughter.)

Guns Versus Cameras

The choice
between buying a gun
and buying a camera
feels like the choice between
documenting history
and becoming it.

This choice makes me feel like
hope is past tense, that maybe
focusing (the act of bringing an image to clarity)
might be less important than
focusing (the act of breathing to center your aim).

Using a camera is an act of acceptance,
opening an aperture
to allow light to form an image on a digital sensor,
a third eye capturing a moment
for playback, the act of gathering
a story that needs
to be told.

Firing a gun is an act of rejection,
pin striking primer to ignite gunpowder
and throw a slug spinning, screaming
down the rifle like a football spiral,
gravity temporarily denied,
an act of saying,
no
you do not take my life today,
instead I take
yours.

The camera is more expensive
contains lenses precision cut
from glass cylinders.

Captures twenty four
or thirty or sixty frames
per second,
still images strung together
to form the image
of a child running,
a poet reading,
always something in progress.

If you slow it down, you can
watch each image float by.
The best footage creates
a world you never want to leave.

The background
is called bokeh, the lovely
smear that light makes
when it strikes the sensor,
the pleasing blur of memory,
of light, golden,
in the summer afternoon.
The gun is cheaper,
fires sixty or a hundred
or six hundred bullets
a minute.
I can’t keep count.

Contains as many rounds
as the law will allow
each one a human life
taken or saved or taken;
I can’t keep the count.

Ends sentences but not paragraphs,
lives but not stories,
so many
bullet holes, each one,
the shape of a period.
But what
ever really
ends?

When firing your gun,
you must always be aware
of what is behind your target;
bullets have a tendency to
pass through flesh, bone,
and intention.

If you slow it down,
you will become a better marksman,
more competent, more capable
and you may be able to protect
the things that matter most to you,
help you to preserve a world
worth keeping.

Both require
open eyes
and commitment.

Both are called

shooting.

Disco Demolition

For Jason Tseng, Micah Bucey, and Gloria Gaynor.

In the 1970s, disco,
the child of soul, funk, and salsa,
was the most popular music in America.
Every nightclub pulsed with that four to the floor beat
from New York to Los Angeles,

And it was gay and brown and beautiful,
not in spite of
but because of these things.

When the White Sox blew up a crate
of disco records at Comiskey Park,
they weren’t trying to destroy a few pieces of vinyl,
they were trying to comfort regressive troglodytes.

The backlash against disco
wasn’t just the usual exhaustion
with a dead genre,
but fear of a black planet,
of a gay revolution,
of a Latin uprising.

The National Pastime
has always been slamming
a boot down on the neck
of somebody different.
But our lives were never a game
and rhythm has always been
in a league of its own.

So when fascists arrive
armed with bluster and bravado,
erect cocks barely disguised,
show them how bone dry palms
wrung out by self-hatred can’t hold
this sweat slick skin.

When they try to apprehend your beauty
show them what all this cardio was good for
and make your fabulous escape.

Show them why
we measure records
in revolutions per minute,
and their only choices
are thirty three
or forty five
not zero.

When the idiot astronomers of
social conservatism
try to convince you that
the universe revolves around them,
tell them that retrograde motion
is nothing but the illusion of a false perspective.

Our Earth always spun around this exquisite sun,
unafraid to be sequin and glitter.
This world only spins forward,
and our dream of
beatmatched brothers and sisters
moving from song to song
seamless
is the Truth.

So when fascists call your heart a crime scene,

dance.

When they bring cinderblocks
to build your body into a prison,

dance.

When they try to bludgeon you with their God,
tell them love
has always been the moral majority

and fucking dance.

And when this is all over,
and we’ve won
smile
and ask them:

Did you think we would crumble?
Did you think we would lay down and die?

No.

We survived.

Why I Love Han Solo

When Han Solo says:
“Crazy thing is… it’s true. The Force. The Jedi… All of it… It’s all true.”
Rey, Finn, and every Star Wars fan hear
their childhoods confirmed,
as if the wrapping paper tube
was a lightsaber the whole time,
as if Jar Jar Binks never happened,
as if we were never naive
to put our faith in clean firewalls
between good and evil.

But in that joy
we miss how Han says it
with the weight of a man
who’s lost it all
to something
he didn’t even want
to believe in the first place.

In the smoke and acid jazz of that cantina,
Could Han have possibly known where
Ben Kenobi’s simple job
would lead?

That he would go from scoundrel
to hero
to husband
to father
and back again?

For Han, when the Force Awakens,
it steals his only child.

When Han says the Force is real,
he isn’t exalting a childhood fantasy,
he’s saying that for some people the universe
is something that just

fucking happens to you

like freight trains
or drunk drivers
or suicide

and after you dig yourself out of the wreckage
all you can do
is go back
to the only thing
you were ever good at,
which was theft,
which is to say taking something back
from a galaxy that took so much from you.

Some people love Han Solo from Episode 4 to Episode 6
but the Han I relate to
is old Han from Episode 7,
because he knows what it feels like
to lose something.

My Han asks
where the Force was
when Snoke twisted
every beautiful thing inside of his son
into nothing but blackened gnarled wood
and a lightsaber so full of darkness
that it spits and screams and can
barely hold its shape,
a monster that worships
the family’s black caped mistake.

And in the bottom of his cups,
he screams at the Force
to take it all back,

to save him from Mos Eisley
and all his goddamn heroic choices.

That maybe the Force could
let him know
that he ought to tell
Ben Kenobi to fuck off
and find another sucker
for the galaxy to act out
its grand stories upon?

That maybe Ben
should find
some other fool
to save the princess
and marry her.

Some other fool
to lose his princess
his ship
his son,
who’s also named Ben
because the Force
is not omnipotent
but it does appear
to have a sense of humor.

But deep down, Han knows
“That’s not how the Force works.”

That’s not how it works.

It just grinds forward
through friends
through love
through children.

And if the Skywalker Solo family curse
is fighting
the same war
over and over again
forever.

Then in the end,
all you have,
is the choice
to walk onto the bridge

and tell your son
one more time
that you love him

and he can come home

if he wants to.

No, really, tell us.

I hate the phrase “Tell us how you really feel.” This phrase, always spoken in response to a passionate statement, is just a douchey response to actual emotion. You think you’re maintaining a cool, detached demeanor when in reality you sound like a passionless motherfucker whose primary concern is remaining disengaged. You know what you’re doing? You’re telling us how you really feel.

 

And you feel afraid. You’re afraid of letting people know that you have feelings. That you might care about something. Because you do care, and you know that caring makes you vulnerable. You think vulnerability makes you weak (it actually makes you strong) and feeling weak terrifies you.

In fact, someone just did display a moment of passion, a moment of vulnerability, and it reminds you – some people in this world can be brave. Some even do it reflexively. They hold little back.

And that makes you feel weaker, even more scared than you usually do. So to re-assert your control over that situation, your life, your delicately inflated self-image, you smirk, lean back, and utter a detached, “Tell us how you really feel.”

 

You know what? I would like to know how you really feel. Tell me what lights you up inside, what you dream of, what you’d fucking die for.

Be brave. I know you have it in you.

Tell us how you really feel.

We’re waiting.

When racism dictates what to name your kids.

I want to have children someday. They’ll be mixed Jewish-Chinese. Carolyn and I wanted to name our kids something really Jewish to go with their Chinese last names. We were thinking “Anoch” and “Esther”. Reading about the Kaifeng Jews in China, I thought it would be really neat to give our first child the gender neutral (?) middle name “Kaifeng” as a tribute to both of our roots and the synthesis thereof.

However, in Trump’s America, with the rising anger against China, it might be advisable to name them something Anglo as hell, and give them her last name – “John Light” “Andrea Light” – to avoid bureaucratic scrutiny. The alt-right is anti-Semitic as hell and the Republican hatred of China is well documented.

My normal stance on these issues are “Fuck racists, I do what I want.” but this is not a choice I’m making for myself. This is a choice I’m making for my children, for people who will have to deal with that choice for the rest of their lives.

This is the kind of shit I have to fucking think about – how racism will impact what I name my kids. This is a awful violation. Small in the grand scheme of things, but disgusting nonetheless. Think about that in the voting booth this November.

Tonight’s Debates

My wife and I are legitimately, deeply worried about the debates tonight. HRC has a wealth of experience and knowledge, but Trump is a totally unpredictable debater and no one knows what he might say or do and how it’ll play with the general electorate.

This is a guy who says our queerness shouldn’t exist, my brownness shouldn’t exist, and our interracial marriage shouldn’t exist. This is a man who would ship off our Muslim friends to internment, allow our black friends to be killed by the police, and allow thousands of refugees to die at the hands of ISIS (which plays directly into that organization’s hands).

I get that y’all in safe states might want to vote third party, but listen to me: Trumpism cannot be defeated by narrow margins. We need to show protofacists that this philosophy of muscular, aggressive know-nothing xenophobia and racism has no place in our country. That it cannot and will not win elections. Victory against Trumpism cannot be slim – it must be devastating.

Because if it isn’t, the next person espousing Trump’s ideas will have a real PR team. They’ll be able to shut their mouth and code their speech. They’ll be able to advance their hideous ideas down the road that he paved. They’ll have the support of the Republican establishment. And that man will be elected, and the fallout from that event cannot be estimated, but it will surely be terrible, for America and for the world.

Dear liberal friends.

Dear liberal friends,

 

Remember when I told you, throughout the Obama administration, that the normalization of extralegal assassination of American citizens was a terrible idea? Remember when I said that Project PRISM was a terrible violation of our rights and set a terrifying precedent? Remember when I told you that an expansion of executive power, under a president you trust, will eventually pass into the hands of a president you don’t?

 

President Trump will have the power to extralegally assassinate you with a drone strike. President Trump will know exactly what you’re writing on the internet about him RIGHT NOW. President Trump will also have the nigh unlimited power of the Presidential pardon, the support of the nation’s largest police union, and command of the world’s most powerful military, which has a limitless Authorization for the Use of Military Force.

 

The new powers you give to a president you trust will eventually pass into the hands of a president you don’t. I told you. I wish you had listened.

Grief

After Coral More

When other people
talk about grief

I think about
how you alive
feels the same
as you gone.

How the empty space
between us opened
long before
your breath stopped
filling it.

Flying too close to
the sun
feels as impossible
as escaping
the black hole
the sun
leaves behind.

My wings melted
and I fell inside
of you.
Your gravity
snapped my bird bones
which is to say
even when you’re dead
I cannot avoid
your silence.

Many lines
have been crafted
for missing fathers
and strong mothers.

I cross the genders
in my mind
try to relate

and fail.

Those are not
my poems
any more
than you were
my mother.

I wrote another poem for you
about astrophysics
moon metaphors,
of the endless descent
toward death
we all face,

how you decided
to murder your voice
and me
so much earlier
than disease took your body.

If this was your way
of saving me
from the black hole
of your disease

you failed.

Conspiracy theorists
talk about rogue planets
like they’re the danger

but what about the star
that severed my
gravitational ties
and broke my orbit?

Whose fault is this

really?

Ask yourself,
“Who was
the son
in this situation?”

Sometimes I wish
this had all happened
when I was a baby,
before
I could speak
to you
and before
you
could stop
speaking
to me.

If Icarus
never knew
his father
he never would’ve
had to escape
that tower
anyway.

Myths can never decide
who the victim is.

We use them
to explain
what we can’t understand.

Like why the morning came.
Like why the wind blew.
Like how I managed to survive

any of this.