For Jack

The hardest thing about celebrating the life of Jack Damen is thinking of all the discussions we never got to have. Thinking of all the questions I wanted to ask him. Jack was, after all, the man that taught my brothers and I how to be men. Now that we’re here in our thirties, what is life like after this. Without your father. Without your mentor. Without your oldest friend.  

Some questions I think I already know the answer to. How did you do deal with hardship? How do you deal with losing your family?  Jack taught me that the only way to overcome the overwhelming darkness of life’s hardest moments is to laugh at them. You might still feel pain. You might still cry. But you will come through it at the end, sometimes with a smile on your face. I won’t give you all the goriest details of the time I was literally closest to Dad, but it was at a time where I felt great sadness. Sharing that story with my Mum and Reuben allowed me to laugh: even when all I wanted to do was curl up into a ball, cry and scrub my right shoulder until it sparkled.  

Even those lesser trials -- be it slogging away at work, cleaning the shower, or the general mundanity of life -- Dad taught me to laugh. At everything. Whether it was with a non-sensical little ditty, or singing a jingle with a funny voice. Dad’s answer to hardship was laughter. I feel like I’ve made it mine too.  

I would also like to ask Dad how he had the energy to care so deeply for his family, his house, and for every living creature that passed through the threshold. When people reached out to me following Jack’s passing, his friends and family would say that Jack made them laugh and that he was a very sensitive soul. I saw this first hand -- whether it be Dad overfeeding the dogs, or enchanting a pack of magpies who attended our house daily for what felt like 2 years -- Jack cared so much for the natural world, and the creatures within it. Dad would drop everything if he saw an animal in distress. He rescued many an injured bird within a 5 kilometre square radius of 416 Robinson Road, Geebung. Dad would welcome our friends into his house for days, sometimes weeks, at a time; never asking for details, or demanding anything for the privilege. He cared for all creatures, great and small, and still worked a grueling job for what felt like 10-16 hours a day. I don’t know how he found the love and the energy to do it. But he did.  

Dad, how did you find the energy?  

The second hardest thing about celebrating Jack’s life is remembering how his ceaseless care and energy was claimed over time by Parkinson’s Disease and Dementia. While the diseases were cruel, Dad still held true to the answers he gave us. He could light up the room with his smile and cheeky laugh, and he still cared about living things be they real or imagined. No time was this more evident when Reuben and I went to retrieve Dad from Sydney after an in-flight incident. Even though the disease made Dad fear for his life, he still tried to feed the animal in the people mover we rode home in. It doesn’t matter that the animal was an air conditioning vent in this case. The answer was the same.  

Finally, I would like to thank everyone who was involved in Dad’s care, particularly in Dad’s final years. I would like to thank my Mum who took care of Dad with grace and the utmost sense of commitment. I would like to thank my wife, Carly who supported me throughout Dad’s decline and passing and who cared for Dad dearly. I would like to thank my brothers, Beau and Reuben for helping me laugh in spite of the greatest loss of my life. I would like to thank my friends and family who made the time to see Jack and made him feel loved. I would also like to thank my colleagues and friends who have sent messages of condolence, and who have helped make this process bearable.  

Care for each other, care for the land and the animals, and laugh when you can. 

Apex Legends after 1000 hours

Apex Legends is a game about dying. Mathematically speaking, it's the outcome of roughly ninety-six percent of the matches I've played. Those exceptions, where I'm proclaimed champion and survive a 60 person battle royale, are as fleeting as they are perfect.

Even the best players falter. No one is invincible.

If were to hazard a guess, I've spent at least 1000 hours playing this game. That perfect winning feeling still feels worthy of pursuit 5 3-month-long seasons in. More than any other battle royale game I've played, Apex Legends is full of quiet time :lengthy periods of relative calm that punctuate the bangs, booms, and zips. These moments are where I've come to appreciate the various systems and the two beautiful but dangerous worlds I've inhabited for up to 20 minutes at a time.

The ability to ping your enemies and items of interest, and respawn your teammates may have been co-opted by other games, but they're still most intuitively managed in Apex. Fortnite's respawn trucks lower the stakes with multiple uses, Call of Duty's gulag is a little too bleak for someone who still occassionally dreams of a glorious socialist future where we live in peace and with dignity. There's nothing that Apex can really claim as its own anymore, but it's still the best game about killing upwards of 50 people at a time.

Apex can't even claim to have the most diverse range of characters, though the representation achieved through its small cast is worth celebrating. It is not unusual to start a match with a squad of 3 women. 2 of the characters are canonincally queer.  While this is fundamentally a game about shooting people with your bullet guns, it's not just humorless white dudes (or even dudes, for that matter) exchanging fire. Does face-level diversity mean a great deal when you're still getting called homophobic and/or misogynistic slurs when you make a mistake? Probably not the place for me, a cis, straight, white man to make comment, but I've seen a few streamers and content creators who fall outside of that race and gender grouping talk about how much it means to them. Maybe that's enough.

A diverse roster is great, but it doesn't count for much if the core game it's wrapped around doesn't work. I's just as well that, in my opinion, no other multiplayer shooter works better. There is a sense of joy to movement that still hits when I'm sliding down mountainous terrain at great speed, zipping from riverbed to mountain heights, and scaling up buildings for the six thousandth time. There is nowhere that can't be reached. Watching the best players is like watching skilled drivers on a track that keeps warping to different shapes and sizes. Unless you're sniping, movement incurs no penalty to aim, so encounters always feel different. I may have died to the R-99 submachine gun a thousand times, but each time that sense of disappointment felt as though it set in in a different way. As the map shrinks and positioning becomes paramount, some wins feel effortless and others meticulously planned and executed. Each of the 250ish wins I've achieved have occured in different circumstances, in different parts of the maps. The same can be said for roughly 6000 losses.

I understand that battle royales are not for everyone, and Apex Legends will be for even fewer people. While there are characters who spew punchlines while downing enemies, this is a game about shooting as many people as you can, as fast as you can without dying yourself. Some achieve that sense of relief through much lighter (as in, nonviolent) subject matter: that's good too. All I know is that I have to stop myself from playing game. This review is over a year in the making because every time I sit down to write it, I am overcome by the urge to play another match.

Is the fact that I've finally committeed this to the web evidence of the spell breaking? I would argue not, as coronavirus-mandated isolation has only allowed me to play more without the ability to engage in other social interactions. When I get to see my family again, the balance will change. I want the balance to change. But for now, I hope you'll consider being jumpmaster with me for a few matches.