solitonic: Recent Episodes

Edmund Chu

Edmund Chu talks about video games, technology, and culture. And then he drinks a cup of coffee.

Before he goes, I hug F; he says, "Good luck to you." We laugh, because what else can you do?

From the Pine Box to Queen Anne, I reckon I have a forty minute walk to process what I'm seeing: a hateful, racist, sexist ideologue is on the verge of becoming the leader of the free world. The collateral around this, though, twenty minutes in, is what hits hardest: the nation's legislative body will bow to kiss the ring. The limbs of the judicial corpus will be amputated; replaced with a twisted arm here, a gangrenous leg there. The rot will linger for a decade, and more. I give a cigarette to a man rapping on a skateboard; a Hamilton to a homeless woman sobbing on the sidewalk. I see a couple locked in an embrace. Five blocks away, I look back, and they're still there, shoulders shaking. I flick a dozen cigarette butts into the gutter, because what can you do? It's tempting to assign blame, but what this is, is ancient and hungry and jealous, and names fail it.

You can't see the stars in the city. If you don't know the streets, you navigate by landmarks. I walk by the Amazon biospheres; in year or two, it'll be filled with greens, and tended to with blissful ignorance. The rest of us can look from the outside, at least. I walk by the Tesla dealer, gleaming chrome. Men in suits leave a bar, somehow laughing: they could go to Canada, one says. They could. And then there's the rest. The ones we can quantify, and the ones we can't. The losses that we can never know. The Space Needle is to the west. I follow it to the center of the city, my home.

I want to remember the good things first. I might not look like it, but I’m an optimist. Not necessarily in the “it’s for the best!” way or the “it’ll turn out alright!” way, but the “something good is out there and will continue to exist, come hell or high water” way. I admit that how this manifests generally makes me look like a rube. When a tabler for a charity manages to flag me down and tell a story about a bright, intelligent, but profoundly economically challenged girl in the Philippines, I want to believe it. When a stranger tells me he needs my phone so he can let his family know he’s okay, I want to believe it. When a homeless person tells me that he needs bus fare to get to his AA meeting, I want to believe it. When I think about the year 2014, I want to believe that, contrary to all evidence, it was ultimately a good year. That I figured myself out, or at least started on it. I want to remember the good things. I went to XOXO with a broken heart and met dozens of talented people and came back feeling like I had not only done something brave but that I was capable and courageous. I took a project at my job that made me feel like I was productive, intelligent, solving the right problems. I started writing for the Arcade Review, an amazing publication filled with astounding, formidable work. I don’t know if happiness necessarily comes easily for anyone. But sadness, at least, comes easily to me. I know I’m not the only person who has to do what feels like a disproportionate amount of work just to feel not depressed: we wouldn’t have diagnoses and medication and counseling if I was. I want to remember the good things. And I know this: some good things happened, and they happened to happen to me. But knowing and believing are different, distant things.

I found Sleater-Kinney only a year or two after they went on indefinite hiatus. It was my second year of college, and I was curled on an stuffy school-owned sofa, feeling utterly terrible about everything ever. I was browsing Last.fm, which I guess is kind of like Spotify before we had Spotify, and I saw the photograph, among all the other recommendations: three women leaning into the street, bored, one with her hand raised to hail a taxi. The album was The Hot Rock. The song was “Get Up.” That was the start.

That album, I found, turned out to be not entirely representative of S-K’s oeuvre. True, the band seems to have a habit of reinventing themselves with every album; it’s fascinating to listen to their discography in a marathon session, from the barebones punk of their self-titled album to the near classic-rock production of The Woods to this year’s grungy, fuzzy No Cities To Love. And there’s a definite through-line to nearly all of it—if not sonically, then at least thematically: their songs often embody anger (one that as a cis male I honestly can’t speak to except in generalities—and really not even then—but here we go), anger at corrupt(ing) systems, systems that view them as “just women” (see, e.g.: “Modern Girl,” “Was It a Lie,”), and the power that arises from that anger (“I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone,” “Let’s Call It Love,” “Male Model,” “Prisstina”). I honestly don’t think there are many bands that have achieved that kind of coherence from their careers, that started so fully formed that the only path was to change their form entirely.

But The Hot Rock (1999) stands away from that. I’m not saying that this makes it better or worse than their other albums—simply different. Dig Me Out (the album prior) seethes and growls with Carrie Brownstein’s guitar, a nearly perfect rock album, the one that made Sleater-Kinney and Call the Doctor—tremendous records in their own right—feel like mere warm-up. Corin Tucker wields her voice like a whip. You can break your knuckles on Janet Weiss’s drums. And All Hands on the Bad One (2000, the one after Hot Rock) could easily be called the party album, politically charged and brimming with hooks and begging for sing-alongs. And from there, it’s a straight-shot to what Sleater-Kinney sounds like today.

But, then, The Hot Rock is a sharp detour right in the middle of their career. It’s sedate (as sedate as a rock album can get, anyway) in comparison to Dig Me Out, introspective and spiritual next to All Hands on the Bad One. With “The Size of Our Love,” the trio tells a story about a couple dealing with cancer: “I fight for a heart, I fight for a strong heart / I fight to never know this sickness you know / But I know it’s my own, I gave it a home.” (More often than not, I skip it—I’m usually not steeled enough to listen to it.) With “Get Up,” they stare, hearts open wide, at the beautiful impossibility of how anything is anything at all:

And when the body finally starts to let go

Let it all go at once

Not piece by piece

But like a whole bucket of stars

Dumped into the universe

Or how about “A Quarter to Three”, where they look at the wrong side of a failed relationship: “And the photo booth strip, / and the letter you wrote / they feel like nothing I could hold.”

I could go on. It’s not like The Hot Rock was the first and last time they did any introspection, and it’s not like the album lacks for grand sociopolitical statements either—far from it—but it is their only album where internal conflict came to the fore. And it’s my favorite album for that reason. (Dig Me Out is probably the objectively best album, but, well, that’s another article.) I remember listening to it with a certain soul-ache that I couldn’t express and wouldn’t understand for another five years, but feeling like this band had somehow tapped into that hurt, rang it like a bell, could speak to it, could create music and art from it. I remember the complicated optimism of “Burn, Don’t Freeze,” the cosmic love in the aforementioned “Get Up,” the grit and resolve radiating off “Start Together.” I wondered what part of me had kept me from ever realizing that those things could be part of my life. I remember how badly I wanted those things for myself, despite myself.

“Oh little light that shines for me in the dark of night
Oh little sigh, sometimes I follow you all the way home
I would almost have to ask you, I hate to be led
So give me a spark, I can look for instead”

— “Night Light”

When I learned that Sleater-Kinney was releasing another album, I really did flip a lid. I had given up on ever seeing them perform—one of the tragedies of making your favorite band an apparently disbanded one is that what you see is all you’ll ever get. So when their new single, “Bury Our Friends,” came out, I put it on repeat for a week. When No Cities to Love was released, I listened to it for hours and hours—I still do. When they went on tour again, I was resolved to see them no matter what. And I did.

And I can only barely tell you what it was like to be there. I was stunned. I couldn’t believe it. As they took the stage, that feeling of wanting better flooded back from wherever I’d pushed it down to protect myself. About halfway through their set, Carrie Brownstein took up her mic and said, “If you think you’re invisible out there, you’re not: we’re looking at you.” Which meant more than I can really express. If I’m being cynical, she probably said that at every show. But I heard her say it that evening, and I know she said it to us. I was thinking: I’m glad I’m alive right now. For once, believing came easy.

I think I’ve committed to something like a three-ish year cycle for buying these things, which is probably about the right length of time.
Up until now, I’ve been using an iPad 3, which is not a bad device, though it should be telling of the iPad 3’s status as a stop-gap for Retina screens that it was phased out after only eight months—exceptionally short even by Apple standards. I suspect that I could have probably gotten away with using it for a year or two more; I generally used it for reading articles in Instapaper, flipping through comics, and doing some light text-editing. For these purposes, it certainly didn’t provide a bad experience; the jump to iOS 7 (and the myriad 3D animations and transparency effects therein) was not merciful to the A5X processor, and my favorite iPad text editor, Editorial, needed a patient hand while typing, lest the system start dropping keyboard taps. But the high resolution screen is still remarkable, and the vast majority of apps still support that system. For casual usage, it’s still a great device.
Which is why I recommend that no one currently interested in an upgrade go for a test drive on an iPad Air 2.
The number of improvements seems rather weak on a spec-sheet. Faster processor? Okay, sure. Better camera? My smartphone is better still (and less wacky-looking to use). It’s nice that it’s not as heavy. A laminated screen, whatever that means.
And yet: I still had that same kind of sensation, using this new device, as I did when I first touched an iPad. Which is to say: this feeling that we’ve reached The Future, we’ve reached Peak Computer[1]; if it’s true that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, then this thing is total wizard.
It’s hard to sell short how light this thing is; my phone feels heavier.[2] Reviewers have mentioned that the using the improved touchscreen feels like directly manipulating pixel, and this is true, though I’d add that the new processor is a big factor in this too, eliminating virtually all lag from any gesture. Using a five-finger swipe to change between apps, for example, is instantaneous; I’m no longer waiting for the gesture to register, then for the OS to load the preview screenshots of other apps, then finally render the animation, all of which took a full two or three seconds[3] on my iPad 3. With this Air 2, it lacks any of that ceremony; I’m pushing and pulling pixels around, like they’ve just been sitting just behind the bezel, waiting for me to yank them into view. Which makes me feel like a total wizard.
The speakers on this thing are pretty loud, certainly louder than they were before. I listen to a lot of podcasts while puttering around the apartment, so this is a welcome change. But I’m not a fan of how the whole case vibrates when you’re listening to anything at even moderate volume—it’s not comfortable to hold (unless you like giving your fingertips a light massage), and just because of that, I’ve found it fatiguing to hold while watching a movie with someone. I’ve taken to reaching for headphones when I’m by my lonesome.
It’s also got a fingerprint sensor, which makes unlocking the device convenient. I use a Smart Cover, though, so it unlocking the device remains a two-step process for me. That said, I’m still digging the cover. I was a bit skeptical of the three-panel design, but it seems to fold up into a stand well enough: the magnets on the far left and right edges, which lock the thing into a triangle shape, seem sturdy, and in the low-angle typing arrangement, the iPad seems to lie a bit flatter than with the previous Smart Cover. I prefer this.
Yet. And yet. I kind of need to temper all of this. I feel like I’ve been pretty effusive about this thing—and don’t get me wrong, it’s a marvel of engineering, and it’s still challenging my conceptions of personal computing. But in a really narrow-minded, rabble-rabble-Apple-isn’t-innovating kind of way, I have to wonder if this really is it—if this really is Peak Computer.[4] Because the iPad Air 2 is, in the end, just (“just”) another iPad.
An exceptionally fast, light, elegant iPad. Which is nearly indistinguishable from magic and makes me reconsider what computers are supposed to look like. That’s all it is.
The future is weird.

I know this is not true, and the best days of our computing lives are ahead of us, but it’s still a hard feeling to shake. ↩
This is also not true, I’m pretty sure. (I’m too lazy to look up exact numbers.) And mostly it’s a function of the iPad’s weight being distributed across a larger volume. But again: still hard to shake the feeling. ↩
Cue small violin. ↩
For a second time: I know it’s not, but the feeling is, yet again, hard to shake. ↩

When the player removes a door brace, the last bit of the (mostly non-interactive) animation is of Ripley dropping the contraption off to her right with a nice clunk. Great. Great!

But: that clunk sound comes from the left channel. Listen/watch carefully. Headphones might help. (The sound of the wrench turning also illustrates a similar issue.)

I think it's pretty clear that this is weird, but it isn't technically inaccurate. As Ripley drops the door brace, the player’s view pans right and rotates slightly counter-clockwise. Obviously, doing this would angle pretty much anyone’s left ear closer to the ground—so, yeah, the sound "should" be louder on the left.[1]

But that’s the problem; it’s accurate for Ripley, but it isn’t true to how I actually perceive/interact with the game space. This is maybe counterintuitive for first person games,[2] since ostensibly Ripley’s eyes are supposed to be my eyes and Ripley’s ears are supposed to be my ears; but creating that illusion isn’t simply a matter of mapping her senses directly onto mine. The sound should really just come from the right channel.

Have I reached that point where the word “left” looks mega weird? Left left left left left left left left left. ↩
As a fun exercise, imagine playing a third-person game where sound directionality is based on the player avatar, not the camera. I think that would be a similar weirdness, writ large. ↩

I suppose it is A Format Of Sorts to bind up all the little scraps I’ve written into a big post.

In which yt. makes questionable decisions wrt. his finances I bought a PlayStation 4 so I could play Destiny. You can probably see where this is headed.

It’s actually really strange owning a gaming console and playing AAA games again, mostly because it doesn’t feel like much has changed in the two or three years since I last touched a console. It seems telling that all three games that I now own for this parallelogram exist and could be played on other pre-existing platforms.

As for Destiny itself, well, it’s just a bucket of nonsense, isn’t it? It’s a lot of plot without a story, I think. It’s never clear why you’re going someplace and shooting any particular alien, though it certainly tries hard to tell you that something is at stake and that you must be motivated. The “Speaker,” ostensibly the leader of the free world, spends maybe thirty seconds telling you to stop the end of the world, then turns into a shopkeeper forevermore.[1] There’s a mysterious ~stranger~ whose only purpose is to tell you, in the guise of foreshadowing, that there will be a Destiny 2. I can’t remember, really, why it was so important to locate the “Black Garden,”[2] or why I needed to visit Venus at all. And I definitely don’t understand what was going on with this computer called “Rasputin” who kind of mumbled in Russian (I think), but the bored voice of Peter Dinklage (BVPD) made it clear that it (Rasputin) was obviously important because It Says So Right Here In The Video Game Lore. The BVPD (he plays a robot called Ghost) is just about the only human connection that the game offers—probably because his character is the only one that appears more than three times—and he sounds terribly uninterested in the whole affair.[3]

Cameron Kunzelman argues that Destiny’s storytelling tries to accomplish both an “evocation effect” and detailed exposition but handles neither side well. I suspect that this is at least partially a function of the mechanics of the game, viz. that balance it tries to strike between moment-to-moment-action-alien-shoot (which lends itself to a BVPD-type character) and MMO-style exploration (e.g. falling into a giant green pit on the Moon referred to only as the Hellmouth, a landmark which suggests a lot and confirms very little)—that mechanical balance, too, remains unresolved.

In which yt. reports on owning a Jawbone Up24 I’ve been wearing this thing around for the last three or four weeks, and I guess I like it. I guess. It’s comfortable. I don’t need to charge it constantly. It’s a bit big, but it looks kind of like a thing a person would wear. Plus, I mean, I like numbers. Numbers! Quantify everything! Set goals! Mindfulness whether you want it or not!

I didn’t buy it for the sleep tracking feature, but that’s what’s been most illuminating, actually. Apparently, I don’t sleep well. I stay up late, then I get into bed and stay awake even longer, then I get up in the middle of the night and stay awake a bit, just for kicks.

Granted, this should have been patently obvious. Yet it did not, somehow, occur to me that the thirty to sixty minutes that I spend tossing and turning before I actually get to sleep do not count as sleep. And here I thought I was getting a healthy seven to eight hours. (It’s more like five.)

But the thing is that I’m not totally sure what to do with this information. Walking around more is easy; if, at the end of the day, you need to feel a bit more active, you can get up and walk around awhile. You can’t quite do anything analogous for sleep, and I feel terrible about it. Not for want of trying. I’ve been getting into bed earlier, bit by bit; but then I toss and turn for an extra half hour instead. I skip evening coffee (which breaks my heart, but needs must), but I’m still super, super groggy in the morning. I get that it’s kind of part of the programmer ethos to want to, like, figure out the solution to a problem based on data, and I think that’s what I’ve been trying to do, but a few more weeks of this and I’m going to start worrying for reals. Is there such a thing as a nutritionist but for sleep?

There is not Yt. truly regrets[4] all this not-writing he’s been doing. I might be able to claim illness and pre-/post-XOXO anxiety as the cause, although this is totally untrue.

But anyhow, it has been a touch slow at ~~my day job~~. I had a chance to blow out my Instapaper queue,[5] and there are some things on the Internet that perhaps you all as an amorphous (but charming, of course) Internet blob will enjoy.

I’m honestly still coming down from my XOXO high. I feel like I might have done a bad job describing what it was like, but luckily Glenn Fleishman has it covered. And it’s true what he says; there was a strange mix of joy and inclusion and cliquey-ness, as if to say, “This is my inspirational group! Mine!” To be a part of such a group is empowering and terrible. Fleishman mentions this as well, but Tim Maly’s essay on who was not at XOXO and who we (i.e. western-centric technologically literate people) consider “creators” is difficult but worthwhile.
Zoyə Street does a close reading of “Tsukema Tsukuru,” a Japanese pop song about makeup. (Yes.) I like the distinction drawn between “fake” eyelashes and “attached” eyelashes; anyway, authenticity is just a social (as in collaborative) construct, right? I think there’s a lot of power in consciously separating “the feeling of wearing makeup from the sense that makeup makes you look [a] particular way to other people.” Feels kind of like the first step in owning the conversation wrt. yr. own authenticity. (Which, again, is probably unimportant because it’s a social construct.)
The latest trailer for Final Fantasy XV is out and it’s—it’s certainly something. Every time a Final Fantasy game is announced, I poo-poo it, and then I watch a trailer and I’m in love again. Frankly, if the game really is just four boyband members taking a dramedy roadtrip with swords, I’d be mostly okay with that. It’s disappointing that this appears to be the first Final Fantasy in many years not to feature a woman as a party member—esp. since the best (read: most interesting mechanically/thematically) games in the series are the ones to feature women in lead roles. Okay, granted, I’m thinking mostly of X–2 and XIII–3[6], and the conceit for both of those is wearing different clothes to get different powers. I can’t tell if this is perpetuating a stereotype (girls, clothes, etc.) or (as per the makeup thing above) owning it, so to speak.
Gamergate has been quiet for the last week or so, but it’s sadly only a matter of time before 4chan shitbirds start another campaign of astroturfing and harassment. The exact reasons for why GG is total bullshit have been covered extensively elsewhere, but it’s still very much an open question of what effect it’s going to have on journalists and indies trying to make a living in the industry in the months and years to come.
Of note, though, is that games writing has seen the departure of Mattie Brice and Jenn Frank, two of the finest writers the industry has had. It’s easy to feel bad about this (and true enough, that video games are so toxic as to allow such a thing is genuine cause to feel bad); but it’s worth remembering that as they move onto bigger, better things, they both leave behind an admirable body of work. Paging through Brice’s blog is an excellent way to spend an afternoon, and last year Jenn Frank covered That Dragon, Cancer; and what starts as a game preview turns into something confused and sad and maybe, a little, feelings-are-looking-up. Worthwhile also is Frank’s tremendous piece on caring for her parents, agoraphobia, and living in Second Life. I am rereading it, paragraph by paragraph, as I edit this post. I am crying a little bit.

Apparently Terran bureaucracy has delegated so much and become so (in)efficient that the leader of humanity has time to sell clothes on the side. ↩
Not about race. ↩
There’s exactly one (1) good bit of writing in the game: Ghost talks about looking up at the Moon and seeing the aliens’ data transmissions coming off of it and wondering/dreading what they were saying. Now, granted, his delivery is pretty bad; the line isn’t actually about Ghost looking up at the moon and being filled with a sense of wonder/dread at the prospect of extraterrestrial life; it’s actually just more exposition, because Ghost goes on to talk about encryption protocols or fake space magic history or whatever. But despite the writers’ best efforts to totally botch this line—this idea that a robot would look up at the night sky and see infinitely more than what a human could see and yet still be filled with that same (presumably) wonder/dread that homo sapiens felt 200,000 years ago—the thought is nearly perfect. ↩
So, honestly, yt. has been using the “yt.” appellatory abbr. as a bit of an affectation; I have finally justified it here, though, because unabbreviated, this would read “Yours truly truly regrets…” and that’s just nonsense. ↩
not a euphemism ↩
I hated typing those tortured numbers as much as you hated reading them. ↩

oh my god i’m so tired and my brain might be a little busted up right now :( :( :( :(
I was decidedly anxious as I walked through the gates of The Redd for XOXO’s opening party. All that sense of not-belonging did, miraculously, vanish after about half an hour, and I rode that feeling for four days. It was weird. I have not had fun like that in a long long long long time.
Contrast with this afternoon as I stepped off the train in Seattle, towed my luggage back to my tiny apartment, grappled with the junk mail that had piled up, and finally in an anxious fit threw all my things down on the living room floor. I’d been feeling the tickle of mundanity since I woke up and checked out of the hotel. Stepping back into my apartment, though, was like getting hit in the face with a brick.

That was also weird. I think this might be a quintessential grown-up experience, a little bit. 4. Man is this a downer or what. I don’t mean it like that! Because XOXO was truly strange and exciting and (I hate this word but it is apropos here) inspiring. I met way too many people. They were way too smart! (That’s a good thing.) We talked about opera and clean water and art and literature and oysters and musician business models and roller derby and feminism and that’s just what I can remember. And they were all making their thing and that was terribly—inspiring. 5. In the last few hours before this year’s festival closed for good, I started asking people, “What are you going to make now?” One person turned it on me; I thought I had an answer, and I didn’t. I froze up for a second. Awkward! I made some vague sounds about writing more, or expanding the kinds of media that I work in. And yeah, that’s stuff I want to do. But it occurs to me, as I decompress and sort through all these feelings of inspiration and excitement and (yes) anxiety and (yes x2) sadness that I am just about as liable as before to get stuck in the same rut. The tarp might come off and I wouldn’t have learned anything. I mean, the tarp is kind of the whole reason I went to XOXO in the first place, right? I didn’t go just (“just”) for creating; I already like the things that I make, as trivial and slapdash as some of them are, and that’s not a new feeling. But getting a brick’s worth of mundane sadness—actually, maybe that is the most important thing I’ve gotten out of XOXO. And I don’t like feeling like this, all boring and sad, hitting the social media like a crack pipe. You know. For a momentary jolt of interconnectedness. 6. I read half of Gilead on the train back and I must have held my breath the entire time. I don’t know how much that plays into this current melancholy, but to read (half) a book about staring death in the face, well, it’s a hell of a comedown. 7. So, then, what am I going to make now? I have no idea how, but I think I’m going to make myself happy. My life’s work. Here we go:

So one day the other week, I woke up to sounds of cheers and merriment. And because I’m a little bitter in the morning, I couldn’t help but get just a little bitter about it. I didn’t know who was cheering or what reason there was to be so merry, I just knew that my slumber had been interrupted by happiness. Yes. I am a morning person.

And later as I was coming back from the cafe, I would realize the cheers were coming from Seattle’s infamous Ride the Ducks tour—that that day for some reason the Ducks were detouring down the street that I live on, and if you are at all familiar with these dorky tourist trap tours, then you know that the tour guide will milk their audience for every cheer they are worth. I’m pretty sure they feed on it like a slake moth. And somehow this made me angrier! Tourists! Having fun on their vacation?! How dare they?!

And maybe it was because my espresso shot was a little overextracted, or maybe it was because I might be a bitter person, but I started getting really bitter about it. Something like: “Fun? That’s not fun. That’s not lasting fun. Do they know it’s not fun? Are they going to post photos to Facebook for their friends to see? Wait, do I have friends? Do they have better friends than I do? Why don’t I have more friends? Why haven’t I called my friends recently? Wait, why haven’t they called me? Would a real friend call or wait to be called? Maybe I should call someone. Wait. What if they think I’m needy. Maybe I am needy. Nobody likes a needy friend. Maybe I shouldn’t call someone. I bet they wouldn’t care anyway. I need to learn to be self-sufficient. I don’t need friends.” And so on, for hours.

And then I was so worked up that I had to crawl into bed and stare at the ceiling for awhile.

And when I came to, I was sad.

Sad because I had the FOMO. Sad because I’d spent the day angry at other people’s happiness. Sad because I’d convinced myself that I was and should be alone. Sad because I should know by now that there are people who reserve thoughts for me and my well-being, and yet—not for the first time, and I doubt for the last—I was trying to push them out of my own brain, because I thought was I alone and had too much shame and guilt and rotten insides to deserve friends.

Some people who know me well and read this might be surprised to hear some of this. I wasn’t going to write it. I’d been thinking about writing it for a few weeks, but I decided to shelve it; and what you’re seeing is pretty different from what I expected. But in light of recent events and recent emotions and recent things, it felt like I could stand to try again. It upsets me, even though it isn’t about me. I’m not qualified to do much besides talk about the specificity of my experience, but if somehow someone reading this needs help, then I hope talking about it helps a little. And? I think I need to hear it myself.

{ * }

Depression is a lot of things, but it’s always personal—sometimes so personal that it feels like no one could ever understand. When I get that low, I can’t but fixate on my shame and my guilt. This feeling of being rotten inside. My belief that I’m a bad person, instead of a good person who’s done bad things. People will ask how someone as widely beloved as a celebrity could die by suicide, and maybe some of those people will silently wonder what kind of chance the rest of us have; of course, the quantity of love is not the same as the size of its meaning. And so that’s kind of what this little blog post is about, about this thing that Matt Fraction was talking about, kind of a little reminder for myself that that meaningful little thing exists, that there’s a thing that I can latch onto and look forward to. What that is changes a lot for me; I held onto his words when I first read them earlier this year. Last month it was the Sleater-Kinney discography. Before that, it was Zoe Quinn’s Depression Quest. Last week it was the new Haruki Murakami book. And those are just the things that I can remember. The other things, I only know that they were small and trivial. But at the time, they were everything.

For anyone struggling with depression, finding that meaning can be the hardest fucking work. The mental and emotional pain of it is just as difficult and horrific as physical pain. There’ll be people who say that it isn’t, as if psychic pain lacks legitimacy, as if it’s possible just to “man up”—but that’s bullshit. It’s ignorant, and it’s bullshit.

I don’t know who’s reading this, and I don’t know your circumstances. (Google Analytics isn’t that creepy yet.) But if you’re in the midst of it right now, then I want you to know that you’re not alone in this. That is a fact, even if you don’t believe it, even if it makes you sick to your stomach, and even if that’s how you feel, I hope that you tuck that fact away in your brain somewhere where you can find it. And regardless if you find that meaning by talking to a friend or finding a therapist or making a vitally important phone call when you’re on the edge and afraid of what you might do to yourself, teasing out and chasing down that hope is everything, and it works, and you will get better because of it. There is a way to get through that pain and emerge on the other side. You’ll have to ask for help, but people will help you. It’ll take work and it’ll take time, and sometimes it might not feel like you’re moving forward. But you are moving forward, and you are getting better.

It’s worth it. It is fucking worth it.

*

So, this week? This week I think I’m latching onto people. Friends and family and all the love that goes with that. Which is cheesy, I know, but there is a loyalty and responsibility that I feel there, and I’m holding onto that, and I don’t want to let that down. So, thank you. Thank you for thinking of me and inviting me to things. Thank you for the video games we play together and for the jokes you make during Dungeons and Dragons. Thank you for the Twitter arguments. (I swear I enjoy them.) Thank you for the hug you gave me the first time we met; you said I looked like I needed one, and you were right. Thank you for having the courage to admit that saying “Have a good day” every morning wasn’t enough anymore, for either of us. Thank you for the rooftop barbecues and the sunsets that feel like they mean something. Thank you for accepting how scared and weak I can be. Thank you for not thinking that makes me undeserving. I love you all.

Edmund tells himself that everything is going to be alright.

Maybe something a bit lower key, yes? A little rambly, maybe? Less formal? (Like formality is even a thing for this blog.) Pretend that we’re sitting at a kitchen counter somewhere. In one of his more recent (term used loosely) videos, Zefrank talks about getting unstuck in creative work, and one of the tricks he mentions is thinking about “specificity of experience.” If I paraphrase (badly), Zefrank is referring to one’s thoughts and feelings in reaction to a particular subject, e.g. how you feel (sad, angry, bored, etc. etc.) watching a movie, or, like, how you feel waiting for it to start or the atmosphere in the theatre after it ends, or even how it feels to write about that movie. I’m pretty sure that as a filthy blogger, this is basically about the only thing that I’m any good at.[1] Anyway, I bring this up because I’ve been literally (not literally) holding a copy of Gabrielle Bell’s Truth is Fragmentary in my hands for two weeks and turning Porpentine’s Skulljhabit over in my brain for even longer, and once again I don’t know quite what to do with ‘em. (Except read them. Ha! Ha! Thanks for that joke, Dad Brain.) Really, the only thing I can think about is that experience part. To wit: they have nothing in common except that they both have a little bit of travelin’ feels to them. So I’m going to talk about travelin’ feels, I think. Kind of.

Truth is Fragmentary subtitles itself with “diaries and travelogues,” which if we’re being kind of rude, sounds like the most indulgent thing ever. Heck, the whole travelogue genre is the poster child for indulgent vicarious living, what w/its jetsetting and deliciously authentic foods and romanticized backpacking trips across the south of France. Yt. has to disclaim that his touchstones for travelogues are limited to Anthony Bourdain[2] and Elizabeth Gilbert[3], so maybe this is a bit heartless.

Whatever my perception of the travelogue in general, though, Bell’s entry in the genre is remarkably pragmatic. Anyone who’s familiar with her work will probably know about her self-deprecating humor and matter-of-fact drawing style (not much shading here, just splotch shadows and a keen handle on negative space), so that pragmatism, too, probably shouldn’t come as a surprise. There’s no glamorous jet set; Bell makes it clear that she’s traveling to Oslo/France/Colombia/etc. as part of her comicking career—to do work.

It’s a direction that lets Bell open up a bit, get kind of personal; there’s no grand culture clash (partially, one has to assume, thanks to the internet), no sweeping rumination on The Entirety Of Life And What It All Really Means.[4] Sometimes it’s just what she’s talking about with friends at a bar, and sometimes there’s small a personal drama or two, like who’s talking about her behind her back. Not fate-of-humanity stuff.[5] But with Bell’s attention (and aforementioned technical skill), those are the kind of situations that feel like they carry a lot of weight. It’s palpable, her sense of accomplishment upon completing whatever she’s working on, whether it’s wrapping up comic convention appearances or drawing the last panel in the comic we’ve just finished. Or, simply, surviving a plane ride from one place to another.

Sheesh, I just wrote a “celebration of the mundane” paragraph, didn’t I?

Okay, but so this is what I’m getting at, yeah? The personal, mundane stuff: surviving a plane ride can have real personal importance, just because sometimes the act of traveling is so fraught with unexpected emotion. Yt. (sort of) remembers a This American Life episode about Travelin’ Feels[6] (and possibly? possibly about crying on airplanes). And if yt. remembers with any accuracy, the whole airplane crying phenomenon comes from a sense of liminality—being neither here nor there, but at least in a quiet, calm moment of loneliness. I’m not talking about being at a destination, but the act of traveling and being in transit; that state really, truly does feel lonely to me, regardless of if I’m, like, going a long distance on an empty plane or surrounded by strangers or even traveling with people I know. So that’s like the most personal thing, right? Loneliness? Right? Am I just a crazy person? Am I? Am I?!

Certainly, if you’re collecting skulls![7] In her liner notes for Skulljhabit, Porpentine mentions the superstition angle, the formation of habits without knowing the efficacy of those habits—crazy person behavior. (I spend about 70% of my time feeling like a crazy person, so believe me.) The randomness of the game mechanics—whether or not one follows any habit at all—turns the world of Skulljhabit into a waiting room (filled with skulls). For the longest time it’s not clear what the player is supposed to actually do—sell skulls? shovel skulls? take endless walks up the mountain? But the interminable fog, the fact that the player can take a one-way train ride and somehow end up back in bed, all contribute to a sense of transience. With how little the village acknowledges the player’s presence, the player barely exists there at all. The “promotion” that the player receives as a result of their decorated skullduggery (heh) reinforces that sense of never belonging. The player’s whisked away, as quickly as they came, to a strange bureaucratic building, seemingly devoid of life but built to purpose—just not your purpose (which is skulls). So Skulljhabit feels like a game about the process of traveling to me; being from a place, going to a place, even being in a place, but not belonging to a place. If we choose to read into the letter written to Skulljhabit (aka the player character)—the emotional core of the game, the single thing that meaningfully ties the player character to some place—then there’s a thread about the things we lose in transit, whatever form that transit takes. And if we want to get really wacky, here, then there’s an entire story being told from the opposite side of that letter, at the same time that Skulljhabit is shoveling in the skull pit. The tragedy I see in the game isn’t the loss of the letter itself, but (maybe obviously) the loss of that contemporaneous story.

That’s all well and good, but what do all these travelin’ feels have to do with anything? Well, I’ve got the Travelin’ Feels[8] these days because I’m planning a trip to Portland to attend XOXO.[9] And I’m scared. I’m scared shitless.

Because, look, 2014’s been pretty bad for me. Okay? It’s been lonely and sad and anxious. Despite seeking help and having a small but profoundly generous support network, I feel like I spend so much time wallowing in negativity. So this trip into the Great Unknown (that is, a Social Gathering in Another City) sans backup is, okay, yes, a lot exciting. But also effing horrific, and the opposite of everything that I want to do right now. Because I’m pretty sure the bubble is shrinking again. I’m pretty sure the tarp is falling off. And I’m pretty sure that if I don’t try this now, I probably never will.

Is this making any sense? Oh man. Okay, different tack. I’ve felt—homeless lately. Weird, right? But I dunno, I have some pretty firm opinions on what a Home is, which sometimes (rarely, but sometimes) leads to tortured sentence construction so I can refer to places of residence by their function. E.g. “your apartment” vs. “your home.” And so this place that I’m living in now, I dunno, there’s nothing there. It is just an apartment. It’s a waiting room (without skulls); it’s transit; it’s not any place in particular.

So. That’s the last four weeks.

You know, I don’t expect this trip to be life-changing; I just want it to be kind of fun. And (okay this is def. going to make me sound like a crazy person) I want to know that I can be in transit and arrive at a place and not belong to that place and still be okay. I would like to be able to get off a plane (or a train car for this Portland trip, I guess) and know that I have accomplished that most basic task of being human and surviving. I’d also like to attend John Roderick’s Rendezvous while I’m in Portland. That would be pretty rad.[10]

I have so many feels, y’all. But I’ve been thinking about it because even after like a decade (!) of on-off blogging, I still feel like I have basically no idea how to express anything external to my brain with any kind of coherency. For example, do you have any idea what I’m talking about with this paragraph? Heck, I kind of don’t! An example would be helpful; that thing I wrote about howling dogs is useful reference material, then. That was very much about the experience of playing that game. Not to say that I’m displeased with how that piece came out, but man it’s only been like a couple months since I wrote that and I already know that I would have done it way differently these days. On the other hand, the experience of playing it was way more important to me than, say, theme and tone and texture and mechanics (though obviously those things fed directly into everything that I found deeply personal about that game). Which is fine; there’s a place for that stuff, certainly. E.g. there’s Zoe Quinn’s Depression Quest, which is in my experience is more important to have played than to play (???). By its own admission, it’s very much (my words) an “experiential” (??????) game, where the important thing isn’t the game itself, but one’s reaction to it; the “tangible” bits—or what Zefrank calls in his video the “specificity of observation”—(so, e.g. loudness of static, locking/unlocking of choices) again feed into that experience—but it’s not a game about its mechanics. Obvious, right? (Can I just disclaim that I realize how tortured this paragraph is? Totally aware of it. I also realize this isn’t an excuse at all [cuz like this kind of disclaimer just highlights how many solvable structural issues that this paragraph has], but probably if MultiMarkdown supported footnotes in footnotes, this problem would be marginally tolerable.)

I guess what I’m trying to say with this mess is that I have a serious struggle with backing up that “experience” with what’s actually in the text. (This came to light when I was talking to friends about True Detective and Rust Cohle’s philosophic turn at the end—spoiler alert, by the way, so you can skip the rest of this footnote—and no one bought it because they felt like it came completely out of nowhere. I was trying to make the argument that basically every scene with old-Cohle getting interrogated by the detectives is Cohle pitting his nihilism against his need to believe that his daughter/his life/anything and everything that humankind has ever done, no matter how seemingly minute, has significance despite the infinite darkness that surrounds them. So when Cohle finally ends that struggle inside himself—“The light is winning”—I felt like it was an extremely effective conclusion to an incredibly complex character arc. It’s a way more interesting thematically, I think, that Cohle considers himself a being of darkness—see his “bad men” quip—and tries to reject his humanity, but he realizes through this that his humanity is the most vital thing about him; contrast to what I think a lot of people wanted out of True Detective, which is that there’s weird supernatural cults and horrors and I-don’t-know-what-else that humanity has no chance against. The problem, of course, is that I couldn’t cite any example in the text to support this. Although this actually suggests to me that old-by-now cliché that people don’t want that kind of hope, and instead want to see gritty and dark, and the conflation of grimdark with thematic maturity. Which is a cliché and probably not true, unless you look at, say, Man of Steel, because after all Superman is supposed to be a completely cut-and-dry good guy who never compromises on the goodness of his heart, except then fucking Zack Snyder was all grimdark about it. End parenthetical!)

Did I mention that this is the blog post where I just completely braindump about everything that I’ve thought about in the last four weeks? Secrets are revealed to the people that read the footnotes. ↩ 2. Who isn’t actually as bad as all that. ↩ 3. Gilbert catches a lot of flak for being what Jesse Thorn once tactfully referred to as a ”certain kind of white lady”, but she really is a funny, smart woman. And she wrote this thing about (yes) boozin’ it up on a backpacking trip across Provence, which, yeah, is like the most indulgent thing ever.

Now, granted: the most advanced thing I know about wine is how to pronounce “pinot”; I’m not the biggest fan of cheese (I think the most adventurous thing I can manage with any regularity is brie, which is like the most whitebread of cheeses); and while I find certain aspects of French cuisine rapturous (of course it would be the thing that resembles deep-fry), I find just as many things utterly ???. Basically what I’m saying is that I’m a charlatan about the things that a person would backpack across the south of France to experience, which is probably why the idea sounds incredible. ↩ 4. Bell brushes up against these topics during a self-imposed quasi-exile, in her home in New York while reading some Michel de Montaigne, and I will quote her thoughts here:

“Life?”

Okay, she goes on a bit more than that, but you get what I mean. ↩ 5. Unless her day was really boring (one assumes) and ergo she has to make up some fate-of-humanity story (e.g. zombie apocalypse) to fill up a page. ↩ 6. “Travelin’ Feels” is the title of the worst blues song ever. ↩ 7. oh my goddddd ↩ 8. Oh man I’m cracking up every time I read “Travelin’ Feels,” why didn’t I edit this out, it’s so badddd. Whyyyy ↩ 9. Festival only; no talks. A bit conflicted about this; it would have been even more costly (and I’m not exactly swimming in cash at the mo’), and if previous years are any indication, the talks’ll go up on YouTube before long to soften the blow. But the list is filled with names that I highly respect, and I would have loved to see them speak in-person. I mean, Gina Trapani? Darius Kazemi? Joseph Fink?! John Gruber?!? Johnathan Mann? Anita Sarkeesian?!?!?!?! Those other people…?! ↩ 10. Hey, wait, what? That’s it? That’s the end? Aw man aw geez! ↩

“She bought you from a pawn shop. You’re an older model, one made with synthetic hair and sagging cheeks.”

You Were Made For Loneliness is, basically, a love story. It’s a lot of love stories. The kind of love that you wish you had, or the kind you wish you still had; the love that puts the fear of god[1] into you, or the other way around; it might be every love story. It’s small in its scope, but ambitious and rather long. It will probably take you a touch over an hour to complete.

Something of a sci-fi anthology made in Twine, You Were Made For Loneliness is a collaboration from ~~seventeen (?)~~ eighteen contributors. Centered on an android waking from two decades of sleep, freshly bought and put to work, this particular unit has the unique trait of holding hundreds (thousands? [millions?]) of other people’s memories in her brain.[2] As the android (named Naomi by her aging, lonely millionaire owner Adrienne) goes about her daily work, two ghostly voices—one in blue text, one in magenta[3]—eventually emerge in her head; and with only the slightest provocation (one word is all it takes), they spin love stories for each other, plucking from Naomi’s presumably vast databanks.

There’s some subtle world building at work throughout the game. Humanity’s been scattered across the solar system by some near-apocalyptic event; we get just enough information to start guessing at what happened, which is fun. We see early on why Naomi is the way she is, and maybe even kind of figure out who the two voices are. And there are love stories.

And why not? Heck, why not. These range from teen drama to historical fiction-flavored[4] to (not trying to disparage it with this term or anything, it’s just what it is) snuff film creepypasta, with a handful of philosophical musings mixed in. The writing’s solid across the board, and contrary to a lot of Twines, there’s a lot of it, too, presented all at once. Though some of these stories just don’t really fit—I wasn’t a big fan of a piece about two ship (airship?) captains squaring off against each other, for instance. That one had too big of a world, written too abstractly for something already fantastical. On the other hand, I was surprised at how well that creepypasta story worked; can love bloom on the internet, where people send each other horrific videos? Apparently, yes. And special mention should be given to a beautiful collection of passages revolving around a poet and a prince, where the player can build up a poem, seemingly at random; the effect is dreamlike and wonderful.[5]

It’s not all roses and synchronous heartbeats, though. The game carries a trigger warning for “suicide, depression, and psychological abuse.” Sometimes sad, sometimes horrific[6]—but I think this is where You Were Made For Loneliness gets its thematic footing and sets things up for Naomi’s narrative to unfold. (Love in bloom is great, but one likes variety in one’s reading.) So—okay, we’re talking about breakups. Okay? Putting the stories aside a moment, Naomi’s narrative culminates in a breakup. After suffering months and months of emotional abuse from her owner, Naomi (not to put too fine a point on it) finally resists her programming[7] and stands up for herself. And it really is a breakup, with Adrienne’s last minute bursts of honesty (borne by oh-god-how-can-this-be-salvaged desperation) re.: the fate of the last android that worked under her, and promises of change and betterment. There is, of course, a choice for Naomi during all this. There’s always a choice:

Forgive
Save yourself

Yt. found that a particularly powerful way to put it. Because that’s usually what it comes down to, right? Selfishness v. selflessness; though put like that, there’s a condemnatory/dichotomous[8] sense about it. Self-x-ness posits hero and villain characters, whichever side yr. on. Which is kind of where the whole self-x-ness dichotomy breaks down, is with the sides, which is why I like how You Were Made For Loneliness handles it; if we’re leading blessed lives where no one we meet is actually evil,[9] there’s just two[10] usually reasonable people in unreasonable circumstances, and there’s going to be some moral relativism all up in here. At first blush, this sounds unconvincing and unsatisfying, but I find a lot of hope in this: that the capacity to forgive/be forgiven/save/be saved isn’t a continuum but a—an—it’s—either way, it’s people trying to be good to themselves and to each other. I guess? It’s hard to describe. This one needs some festering time.

But either way, we come to the same terminus. Whether by her choosing to leave or by Adrienne’s eventual passing, Naomi finds herself cut loose and free to travel into parts unknown; the realization that her future is unfolding before her sparks like a synapse.

And so, the two voices in Naomi’s head: they have a story, too. Theirs is less a breakup, more of an unfortunate separation, occurring at just the same time that Naomi finally leaves Adrienne; a neat synchronicity. The last words of their story are spoken by the blue voice, promising to find the other voice again. There’s this whole suggestion of a soul mates thing, which I could skip over; I actually find it more interesting to consider that You Were Made For Loneliness rejects the concept—because with Magenta and Adrienne gone, who’s left to find?[11] I think one would be hard pressed, too, to argue that Naomi and Adrienne fit the traditional soul mate description, anyway—good friends, given the chance, but I don’t think there’s any profound spiritual connection.

I don’t mean to be all about how nobody is anybody else’s destiny. I don’t want to spout off rationalizations of love, in its myriad romantic/platonic/familial/&c. &c. forms, as if it’s some blast of brain chemicals divorced from any sort of spiritual sense.[12] More that I think the Naomi-Adrienne/Blue-Magenta stories and their synchronous separations, reinforced by the game’s two endings, are a kind of confession that we basically just don’t know what-the-fuck when it comes to how love works/doesn’t work on a philosophical level, but just effin' go for it anyway. Or, put another way, it takes a certain gumption to want to keep wading into a sea of seven billion people and putting in the work to finally do right by one of those seven billion, sight unseen, through breakups and false starts. It’s an admission that an infinite, anxious, exciting future exists beyond heartbreak. That takes a certain love.

Not literally. Well…not any god you know. ↩
Cue ~~seventeen (?)~~ eighteen contributors. ↩
I ended up assigning gender to the two on account of this; I’m wondering how many other players did, too… ↩
If not actually historical. ↩
I peeked at the source file, and I can only assume that it was a logistical nightmare to make coherent. ↩
Incl., aforementioned creepypasta aside, a piece which feels a heck of a lot like a “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.” ↩
A particular gameplay mechanic being, up until this point, that the game presents several options when the player must make a choice—but disables all but one, ensuring maximum obedience. It’s a nice narrative trick, establishing early on that Naomi clearly has some moral agency but, for various reasons, no autonomy. ↩
Yt. thought he made up “dichotomous” and was pleasantly surprised that it was in the dictionary. ↩
Admittedly might be a lot to ask. ↩
Polyamory is a thing, but I don’t know about it. I mean that in the literal, not litotic (“litotic” is not a word) I’m-condemning-it-with-understated-doubt, sense; I genuinely do not know anything about it in any functional and/or philosophical sense, except possibly that the use of “two” in this context is very loaded. ↩
Maybe one could go all Rust Cohle and posit that time is a flat circle and we’re all dying alone, but that person probably didn’t pay much attention during the end of season one. ↩
Is there any way I can talk seriously about spirituality without sounding like a crazy person? No? Okay. ↩

Edited: July 18, 2014

Because yrs. truly was still learning how to count, I misstated the number of collaborators that worked on the game. There are eighteen contributors, not seventeen.

Two weeks later, it’s time to call it. Here’s everything that didn’t seem to deserve a full post.

The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears

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Women are terrifying, apparently, or so one might believe from this giallo-inspired horror flick. Probably? about a woman’s sexual awakening (?), The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears plays its strong cards too early, building up a lot of Hitchcockian tension but failing in the payoff. The film moves through flashbacks and stories told by the exceptionally unreliable residents of a beautiful French apartment building.

Suspense aside, the wild color palettes and off-kilter soundtrack (songs that wouldn’t feel at all out of place in a ’70s young-romance movie) alone are enough to sustain things for, like, the first hour. But the movie loses its footing when knives start going into people; between gratuitous murder sequences (resulting, obviously, in wounds resembling female anatomy) and increasingly hallucinatory/nonsensical scenes,[1] it’s hard to feel like the movie isn’t just jerking you around. Which, really, it is, because it ends up feeling like an exercise in form,[2] containing everything necessary to be a giallo film (goofy title, killer in black gloves, woman named Edwige, &c. &c.) but nothing else.

The Keeper of Lost Causes

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Sufficiently thrilling, probably one of the slickest police procedurals I’ve seen. There’s some fairly clever use of flashback to set things up and inject some much needed tension. And that’s fortunate, because protagonist Carl Mørck is totally wooden. (Actor Nikolaj Lie Kaas does the best with what he can, but still.) His partner, Assad (played by the charming Fares Fares), injects some much needed character warmth as well. But maybe I’ve been spoiled by True Detective; for a few hopeful opening scenes, The Keeper of Lost Causes looks like it’s pursuing the same thing—i.e. character study dressed up as police procedural—but eventually settles comfortably into the latter. Still, it’s pulpy and gripping, with stylish lighting and a soundtrack that knows when to sting and when to back off.

Night Moves

As always, Jesse Eisenberg is a twitchy ball of nerves, which works perfectly for this slow-burn ecoterrorism thriller adjective adjective thing. I’ve only seen Wendy and Lucy from director Kelly Reichardt, and while the subject material of the two movies couldn’t be any different, they feel very similar: sparse, paranoid, rural.

Patema Inverted

I went through a pretty serious Sake Period as a teenager, and having grown out of it in college,[3] I tend to approach anime with caution. Miyazaki films still get to me—The Wind Rises is a hell of a thing—but the truth is that Miyazaki’s style is pretty far removed from the anime that tends to have the most cache with typical anime fans in the West. So despite an open heart and fascinating sci-fi/fantasy setting, Patema Inverted falls into regrettable anime tropes. There are moments of delight—the (wholly unexplained) mechanical city in the sky, the “other surface” of the planet we see in the ending—but really none come from the characters. The villain is over-the-top villainous, so much so that he’s impossible to take seriously—but of course his right-hand man has a heart of gold. Protagonists Patema and Age show a little more promise; but Patema has little to do except get damseled to hell and back, while her love interest, Age, follows the well-worn path of “young man discovering his resolve,” with few twists or turns on his character arc. Weirdly, considering her name is in the title, Patema Inverted spends a surprisingly small amount of time actually tracking Patema; Age ends up being the disruptor and motivator of the plot, and it’s (literally, disappointingly) from his perspective that we see things. Patema is the one standing on the ceiling,[4] because it’s not actually her story.

So much for titular princess characters with interesting stories. Luckily, once again Miyazaki provides.

Calvary

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A couple of movies I’ve watched over the festival have, basically, a “spiritual bent,” so it was a welcome relief that Calvary mostly didn’t, despite its focus on a Catholic priest (Brendan Gleeson). Aidan Gillen deserves some…praise? for somehow managing to reach new heights of smarm and sounding totally unnatural in the delivery of his Irish accent despite being Irish. (But heck, I dunno, do some people actually talk like that?) Anyway, there’s a neat trick, here, where Father James knows who’s going to kill him from the start but the audience obviously doesn’t—the type of plot gimmick that sounds like it might try to point out how clever it is, but is actually (like the most of the movie [although there is is a lot of messiah imagery, but I guess you could have guessed that]) subtle and even-handed in its execution. Heh. “Execution.” Get it?

Cannibal

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Okay, so one might assume that a movie about a cannibal would suggest some amount of grotesquery and/or body horror, but Cannibal has little of that. It’s a beautifully shot film, and I totally wish I could dress as well as Carlos. But the whole premise—prestigious tailor is also a cannibal—really doesn’t have a whole lot of weight behind it, and the whole “eating people” bit doesn’t add any additional depth to Carlos’ character except being this thing that he has to hide from everyone. Honestly, he could have been the regular (“regular”) kind of murderer; or even just had some particular trait that leaves him feeling alienated from everyone else. (Drug addict, maybe? I dunno.)

Our Sunhi

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You know how I said Patema Inverted wasn’t actually about Patema? Our Sunhi isn’t about Sunhi, kind of, and it plays with this expection. One might be deceived by an opening scene in which Sunhi convinces her college professor to write her a letter of recommendation, but quite a lot of the movie follows three of Sunhi’s would-be suitors (professor incl.) as they drift around the city, talking to each other about their love life. The setups are pretty funny and don’t rely overmuch on awkward situational humor. And underneath the quirky humor is a surprisingly potent statement on Sunhi’s identity wrt. these three men, with the three talking in circles about Sunhi, and each individually arriving at the same vapid/self-contradictory/positive-but-probably-not-totally-true-and/or-accurate description of Sunhi. The final scene is fantastic: as the men wander around Changgyeonggung Palace looking for her, Sunhi quietly exits the area—of course, the idea that she is nowhere to be found never crosses the men’s minds. As if to say, “Don’t take it personally, boys, it just ain’t your story.”

Incl. an overly long dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream that surely drew more than a little inspiration from Triangle. ↩
And it really feels like exercise by the end. ↩
My final-ish anime being Gurran Lagann, after which I decided that no other show would ever top in terms of anime-ness. ↩
I mean, predictable, given the title, but not very interesting, thematically. ↩

A long drag on a poison cigarette.

He's extremely affable.

No hay banda.

Get it? Proust? Get it?

~ghost funeral~

I ask myself this all the time.

You don't own them the way you think you do.

I love my home state, and it saddens me that this ban was ever established. I know Ben Milano, one of the plaintiffs; I hope he, his husband, and all the other couples aren’t denied the rights they deserve any longer.

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The only thing this movie is missing is some Gershwin.

Pain demands to be felt.

I definitely would not have sex to this movie.

So, okay! Something a little different. I’ll be attending the Seattle International Film Festival this year and trying to write up some impressions on whatever it is that I end up watching. Probably these will be even less coherent than what I’ve been putting up the last couple weeks, but, heck, like I keep trying to tell myself: FILDI.

So having spent the last two-ish weeks trying to articulate exactly what Porpentine’s game howling dogs means to me in sort of a critical way, I’m going to have to declare intellectual bankruptcy. I suspect in my current state that I’ll never to able to get any sort of coherent post out of all this.

I find it very personal.

SO FUCK IT I like howling dogs.[1] That’s putting it lightly, but I don’t want to gush too much. It has probably become my favorite game. It has reduced me to tears on the two occasions that I played it, each time for very different reasons. It once filled me with what Richard Hofmeier described as “holy dread”.

From the time that I first completed it (many months ago) up until the second time that I played it (not many weeks ago), I completely agreed with his sentiment. The game indeed inspired in me a respect founded on “holy dread”—not simply because Porpentine is a very skilled writer in describing the bleak situation of the game, but because of what might clinically be described as my excessively negative self-absorption. The first time around, playing through howling dogs was like wincing at my reflection in a mirror. The sort of self-involved, repetitious prison that the game plunges players into is just about as good a metaphor for the kind of emotional blockade that yt. (or anyone), with an impressive amount self-loathing, might create.

I fear that I have just used that phrase lightly. “Self-loathing.” And I do not want to take this phrase lightly. “Self-loathing.” I think it’s easy to pass off; just another degree of self-deprecating humor. I know I’ve done it before. (The exact count is left as an exercise for you, dear Readership.) But the normalization of this whole “self-loathing” concept, setting up this whole iterative cycle of feeling progressively more shitty about myself for myriad (generally insignificant) reasons—and yet for an extended, irreparable period, this is what I was doing. (I am still doing it. Less often, one hopes.) [2]

STARVED TO DEATH BECAUSE YOU WERE FED BIRDSEED[3] Something that I find personally difficult about howling dogs’ mechanics: self-care is an option. You’re forced to eat and drink to continue; those things are the bare minimum that anyone has to do to stay alive. But what about the wrappers that your food comes in? The bottles of water that you drink? Do you send those down the trash chute? Do you bathe yourself? That level of self-care is barely a step above not-being-dead. Yet the option remains: is that what you do? Or do you let the trash pile up, ignore the itch of your unwashed skin, so you can tether yourself to some illusory world before the crushing reality of your situation has time to sink in?

Something I find even more difficult: the choice between embracing the visor and embracing the room of dark metal—between glorious escapism and crushing reality—eventually proves to be no choice at all; it’s a red herring. The visor inevitably expels you from its world, and each time you encounter what’s effectively a game over signal:

{*}

Which one might expect from such a thing.

But the cell offers nary a hint as to its inner workings. There’s nothing to suggest the possibility of escape, no subtle gap in its walls, no door that could suddenly slide open. And once the system starts breaking down—when the water ration turns tepid,[4] when the “sanity room” fills with white noise—forget it; if the system did have a path for escape, that machinery has surely broken down, too.

Clearly there is a prison to escape; it’s just not clear what the prison actually is.

The stones wonder if it is interesting to suffer. The end of howling dogs see you entering another world generated by the visor—it is a sequence I remember very well from my first playthrough. This world is by all accounts the most fascinating yet:

A square of leaves dipped in silver, hissing with wind, bristling with night.

The bedroom window. You are awake. You consider going back to sleep, then remember:

I am awake now because it would be most interesting to be awake now.

So you get up.

The patter of interesting things on the sill, on the threshold, at the door. Uncohered interesting things still forming at the corners of your eyes, latent fascinators prickling, swirling just out of sight.

The calendar has no days and the clock, no hours.

Which life was this again?

Most interesting. Interesting. Interesting. And yet there is no substance. But there is a question about worth. “Which life was this again?”

Immediately before you plunge into this, you can look at your photograph in your cell one last time:

You no longer see the appeal of this photo.

Contrast with what you feel looking on it, just a few days before:

Every day you think of ways this photo could have been improved: better lighting, better surroundings, closer to see the subtleties in her expression, further back to see her form and better imagine embracing her…

There is a question about worth.

Bluntly: I replayed howling dogs when I was in a recent dark moment and had a perverse desire[5] to return to its world, where worth (by any definition) was not determined by lasting value but merely by immediate captivation. Like following a dowsing rod from one resonance to another. Latent fascinators.

I suppose that would have been that but for stumbling, basically by accident, upon the game’s elusive Secret Ending—which is really no secret at all.[6] While discovering it does involve a challenge of sorts, the solution lies more in player perception—yes, you, the player, the person reading these words—rather than in mastering some game-like system. There’s no stat to raise, no energy meter to fill.

And on this “true” ending, the false choice between reality and escapism falls away. You are in another visor world, assuming the role of an empress doomed to perish by assassination. (The next in a long line of assassinated empresses.) But if one unlocks the particular secret of this world, the demarcation of visor and cell crumbles[7] with the arrival of a woman referred to as Sky Mask. As she rescues you from your assassin, you realize something vital:

And how didn’t you notice all these days that the material of every surface in every world was black metal and that every light was like something mosquitos kill themselves on.

Everything was dark metal, fluorescent. Neither visor nor cell; they are as good as the same. They imprison, it has to be said, but the prison is something else.

By this point in the game, I was devouring each passage, clicking for the next as quickly as I could. I get the sense that anybody who’d seen me in that moment would have thought I was nuts. Tears welling up.

I imagine one of the most torturous experiences I could will upon myself is continuing that cycle of feeling shitty for insignificant reasons. The weight of each minor moment of self-loathing exacting its price in self-worth.

A “recent” dark moment. “And how didn’t you notice all these days…”

I had a question about my worth.

You understand why the photograph was so frustrating. The (truly) final sequence of howling dogs sees you fleeing with Sky Mask while the walls move to lock you in. Even after overcoming so much danger, the way remains difficult, and the slightest misstep will plunge you back into your prison. The two of you enter a strange library, Sky Mask leading you across:

Running through the darkness, a library of hearts rises up around you. You feel an aching hollow as your gaze twists across the beautiful hearts, the bold hearts, the true hearts.

"don’t stop, please

they’re just showing you what you already have"

And that was enough. I left my room and climbed to the top of a nearby hill, wiping my eyes. I stayed there for a long time, watching the moon rise over the eastern shore.

*

Basics: howling dogs is a Twine game with a vaguely sci-fi bent.

You awake in a small cell (“A room of dark metal. Fluorescent lights embedded in the ceiling”) with little to do except accept and consume your daily ration of food (some variety of flavored nutrient bar) and water (cool and refreshing) from a dispensing machine. You can take a shower and tidy up your space, if you want. There is a “sanity room,” filled with screens projecting some naturalistic, ostensibly calming scene. Eventually, once you’ve exhausted your options (or even if you haven’t), you strap a visor onto your face and play with the lights flashing past your eyes until the next day comes; each scenario that the visor presents you with, so vivid and real, provides relief to what would otherwise be a hopeless prison. Why you’re in this situation, exactly, is never explained (though if you attempt to take more than your allotted food or water ration: “Preserving rations is vital for mission success”). But by the time the game opens, it likely no longer matters; a counter tells you that this is the 367th time you’ve done this.

There’s also a photograph. ↩ 2. Ouch, did that hurt to write. ↩ 3. C.f. Ultra Business Tycoon III, another of Porpentine's games. Kind of a parodic love letter-turned-deconstruction of the unabashed time-suck games that lonely, nerdy people (e.g. me) grew up with. It’s a tender, nostalgic thing, shedding layers of cynical video game insanity to reveal a bright emotional core in its final paragraphs. I feel like it covers a lot of similar ground as howling dogs, thematically, although it is much more of a “game” (OH BOY TIME TO TALK ABOUT WHAT GAMES “ARE”) and eventually becomes more direct in its message. I suppose howling dogs is like looking at yourself in a mirror; UBTIII is your sibling banging on the bathroom door, wondering why you’re taking so long. ↩ 4. Even the barest luxury of chilled drinking water can be taken for granted. ↩ 5. Misery loves company, they say. ↩ 6. On Porpentine’s page for the game, in lieu of a description: “two endings.” ↩ 7. More subtly, in another passage: “[Y]ou balance yourself against statues of her eminence the empress carved in the twilight mode.” Which is an odd way to phrase it, unless one is not an empress. ↩

More than anything, Upstream Color illuminates.

She writes:

This game will be available for 24 hours and then I am deleting it forever.

It doesn't have to be today.

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”

— Haruki Murakami.

Let me talk to you about Netrunner.

Leigh Alexander wrote an excellent feature for Shut Up and Sit Down, reflecting on her own experience learning to play the game:

I can’t. I mean, it’s just a goddamn card game, but this is the part where I get up and leave the room, and slip into my bedroom. There is a perfectly reasonable part of me that is trying to process information. Oh kay. You just got a bit frustrated. It’s a complicated game. Shake it off.

The other part of me wants to fling myself bodily across the bed and cry like a child, hiding among Ikea furniture and the ghostly shapes of unwashed clothes. Ridiculous.

Aaand, oops. That’s the part that wins.

It would be understatement to say that I related.

Netrunner is a cyberpunk-themed card game pitting a hacker (the “runner”) and a corporation (the, uh, “corporation”) against each other. Both can win the game by scoring agenda points: the corp scores by spending time and resources to protect and advance agendas while fending off the runner’s trespasses; the runner scores by circumventing said security and stealing the agendas while the corp fumes silently.

Given that it’s a card game, and a geekily themed one on at that, naturally there’s a pile of rules built on that theme; and even with a decent grasp on the rules, there’s a decent of number crunching that a player will have to do at any given moment. Throw in deck-building and the metagame layer, and the complexity of the game can spin out of control pretty quickly.

All of which is not to say that Netrunner is a hard game to learn. It isn’t, not really. On the contrary, moment-to-moment play actually feels really smooth and even intuitive. I’d say almost anyone can play it with a base level of confidence.

Almost anyone. Not me.

Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s not the math; I’m okay at math. It’s not the rules. I’m fine with those; heck, I even like them. Netrunner’s is very well designed. It feels natural and balanced. It feels like the best parts of math—less made, more discovered. There are protocols—a certain way that things happen. I do this and you do that and we do it in such-and-such order. And this is the kind of thing I like: protocols and systems. A system has kind of a tangibility to it. A system implies that a certain input will result in a consistent, predictable output. Once you understand the rules, once you can shine a light into that black box and see all the interactions, you have grasped the tangible element of that system.

It’s for this reason that I always liked (or had the compulsion to play) Japanese RPGs as a kid; in the end, those games are basically spreadsheets with the goal of creating ever bigger numbers.[1] Those games’ systems are, if nothing else, exceptionally consistent.

So when I heard about Netrunner and all its mathematics and its timings and rules, I asked a friend who played to explain it to me. It was a curiosity. I’d learn the game and be done with it after a couple weeks, if that. I thought it would be a pleasant diversion.

The first practice game of Netrunner that I ever played wasn’t hard to get through, per se; like I said, there’s a lot of rules and number crunching, but I was generally okay with that. I was learning the game. There’s a certain expectation from pretty much everyone that of course I’m going to mix up all the rules. Same with the second game. Even the third. By the fourth, I knew that I couldn’t lean on that excuse anymore. Which was unfortunate, because I was losing spectacularly. This had become anything but a pleasant diversion.

I couldn’t understand what was happening. I knew the rules. I’d built a competent deck, numbers-wise. I knew this combination of cards would do this and that combination would do that, and I’d even pulled those combinations off with aplomb in my games. I had grasped the system. I thought I’d felt the game click. And I was still losing. What. The. Heck. Well, Netrunner has a system. It’s a very elegant one. But having a system is not the same as being a system. Sometimes there are no rules.

I am going to admit something now: I like the game, but I don’t enjoy playing it. Every time I play a card, I might as well be pulling out one of my teeth. Each turn is an exercise in frustration. Each game leaves me confused and vulnerable no matter how well I do. I could be a runner and drive myself nuts face-planting into one Ice Wall after another. Or I could be a corp and see my defenses crumple beneath a flurry of events and a Femme Fatale. It’s not just the transactional nature of these actions. The costs are part of the system.

But I’ve always been the kind of person who does not want to run aground in front of people. And in Netrunner, you are always in front of someone, and you are almost always running aground. Being in front of a person and failing in small but significant ways. Death by a thousand popup windows, as it were. The game makes me want to do nothing except curl inward.

Readership, you don’t have to explain to me how insane and melodramatic this sounds. I’m here writing this thing, and I can barely believe it myself, that I’m getting hung up on this. The messy stuff that algebra can’t solve, where cards are just an excuse. The part with a person on the other side of the table. No system could ever capture that. The impossibility of it.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Netrunner Ahem.

I have not been well, lately.

I think a lot about something May Kasahara says in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle:

“I think you kinda had the wrong idea from the very beginning. You know what I mean, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? What you were just talking about…I don’t know, it’s kind of impossible for anybody to do that stuff, like ‘OK, now I’m gonna make a whole new world’ or ‘OK, now I’m gonna make a whole new self.’ That’s what I think. You might think you made a new world or a new self, but your old self is always gonna be there, just below the surface, and if something happens, it’ll stick its head out and say ‘Hi.’ You don’t seem to realize that. You were made somewhere else. And even this idea you have of remaking yourself: even that was made somewhere else. Even I know that much, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. You’re a grown-up, aren’t you? How come you don’t get it? That’s a big problem, if you ask me. And that’s what you’re being punished for—by all kinds of things: by the world you tried to get rid of, or by the self you tried to get rid of. Do you see what I’m saying?”

That. I think about that a lot.

I swear I must do a reboot of my blog every year or two, thinking, “Yes, now is the time. I will do this.” As if the flow of these specific electrons will start some sort of sea change across every little arena of my life. So I try to do it. And I manage it, for a little bit. The last little while that I had this going, I think I was doing okay. Not good, but okay. I wasn’t, honestly, writing a whole heck of a lot. I swore, e.g., that I didn’t want to crank, and I ended up cranking quite a bit—but I think that was fine, necessary even, because that was how I picked up enough momentum to start (and finish) doing some capital-W Writing. And, in fact, the stuff that I tried to capital-W Write, I felt good about. I knew that it wasn’t actually especially well-constructed and/or insightful, but I enjoyed it; I was proud of the warts; I liked that I was writing about something that I cared about. It was a strange feeling. It was scary, actually, a little, that tension. “Why am I proud of this shitty review of Kentucky Route Zero?[2] Am I really going to try to do a writeup on my bank?[3] Nobody is going to like my overwrought Proteus article. Who would care why Lord of the Rings matters to me? Are you really going to expose myself like this? Leave myself vulnerable like that?” That type of thing.

But I tried. It felt like it was worth it. I liked to think I tried. I’d tap out sentences on my phone during my bus commute and feel pretty happy about them. Then I came back to my apartment and deleted them with extreme prejudice. Who cared? Who would ever care? Did I care? If I cared, wouldn’t I have not deleted it? Is this even about the writing? Do I care about anything at all? Shouldn’t I just be another shmuck on the bus, killing time until the next commute? But regardless of “should” or “shouldn’t,” it’s hell of easy to just…recede. Especially if you are anything like yrs. truly. Forcing yourself to be truly alone. Until being in a crowd and being at the bottom of a well are equal in their alienation.

May Kasahara might not be right about everyone, but she’s at least right about me. I’m not the type of person that can just snap my fingers and be a different person. (Not saying that there’s anyone that can do this, but some people are surely more disposed to it.) I can’t walk into a room of strangers and overcome my own anxieties about being around people. Sure, I could try to force the issue; I could move somewhere where I don’t know a single person’s name, but chances are good that I’d end up doing the same thing I’ve done before, which is to say: curl inward.

This is the part of me that has never gone away. I have a lot of weird, stupid, self-harming things about me, but this little ball of fear and anxiety often feels like the small, hard, blackened core of who I am. I try to cut into it, to split it open and eradicate it, focusing myself laser-like, deeply inward at this single thing; but the deeper I cut, the harder, more blackened each layer is.

Even I know that much, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. How come you don’t get it?

And, honestly, I don’t know quite what to do.

I’m little but I’m coming for the crown So, instead, I am trying to look at it differently. Each little inward focusing I do shrinks the bubble in which I am able to operate as an actual person. But maybe it works the other way, too.

I can win. I can win. I can win. I start winning.

Better. Better. Better. Then, better.

I dearly wish I could say that this has all been leading up to a success story. Fact is, Netrunner really has little to do with anything. It is a means, but there are probably plenty of things that could work as well or better; Netrunner just got there first. So I don’t know if I can ever be well. I don’t know if it’s sustainable to view the game in these self-healing terms; maybe it’s just a detour. I don’t know if it is “good” for me. I can’t “just” be better.

I know that it is good for me to try. And silly as it might be, Netrunner is how I am trying. It draws out my deepest vulnerabilities and shuffles them into my deck and makes me play them onto the table like I’d play an event card. In this territory, there are no rules to fall back on, no way for me to explain or understand or even cope. But the game accommodates, in its way; underneath the glitzy cyberpunk theme, crunched between the mathematics of its myriad systems, is a language that I can just almost make out. Not simply game jargon—it stretches beyond advancement counters, beyond rigs and servers; it’s the language of effort and loss and success, of confidence and vulnerability. It is language of presence: spoken in quiet moments and in being known. I know there are no guarantees. But I think it is a language I would like to speak.

I should note that as a teenager I spent a mild-to-moderate amount of time actively engaged with Progress Quest, which was literally a table of numbers slowly, automatically ticking up. “Actively.” ↩
I was disproportionately proud of my word blur effect. So proud. Holy cow. ↩
Simple, for what it’s worth, and yes, I did try. In one sentence: It’s an online bank, and I like it.

Can you believe I agonized over how to say that? ↩

“He knocked on the door of the pharmacy, where he had not visited lately, and he found a carpenter shop. The old woman who opened the door with a lamp in her hand took pity on his delirium and insisted that, no, there had never been a pharmacy there, nor had she ever known a woman with a thin neck and sleepy eyes named Mercedes. He wept, leaning his brow against the door of the wise Catalonian’s former bookstore, conscious that he was paying with his tardy sobs for a death that he had refused to weep for on time so as not to break the spell of love.”

— Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Basically.[1]

c.f. ↩

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Dave Caolo nails it:

You can’t drive fast in winter. You can’t walk the dog quickly, either. Even getting ready to go outside takes longer than it usually does. And while you’re moving so slowly, look around. The snow is really beautiful.

Winter also reminds us not to worry too much about how our hair looks, or if we’ve got nice clothes. None of that matters when it’s 13ºF.

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Fantastic reporting from Tracey Lien on the perceived gender gap in video games:

Toy aisles are explicit in their gender divide. Clear signage indicates which toys are for boys, and which are for girls. In the video game section, there is little overt exclusion. It's a slower molding of our expectations over time.

Maida might not understand this right away. She hasn't even gotten to the video game aisle yet. But standing among the dolls in their pink tutus, face scrunched up and hands slapping her sides, she's starting in the right place. She's asking the most important question: “Why?”

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It's becoming really difficult to not think that Penny Arcade is run by soulless, dignity sucking robots.

Marco Arment offers this take as well. It's not even that it's Penny Arcade being Penny Arcade, specifically; it's a company showing no respect to the people who like it the most.

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“What are we going to negotiate about? What I would say is, ‘Listen, you see that desert out there? I want to show you something,’” Adelson said at Yeshiva University. “You pick up your cellphone, and you call somewhere in Nebraska, and you say, ‘okay, let it go.’ So there’s an atomic weapon goes over – ballistic missiles – in the middle of the desert that doesn’t hurt a soul.”

Dr. Strangelove? Is that you?

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I’m liking The Toast these days:

The ground felt eerily cool. The pillars and the columns of the Necropolis took on a pearl-blue sheen and began to hum at a violent volume and frequency that put Medrun in mind of a thousand bees glommed onto a tree on a hot summer’s day. A scream went up from the Dwarves. “The prophecy! A woman! The prophecy! A female gamer is among us! We are lost!”

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Listening to people looking at people looking at animals. Host Roman Mars describes it thus:

What you need to know about Wild Ones is that it’s not a book about nature. It’s a book about how we value nature and try fit it into our modern lives. Wild Ones is about the cutesy stuffed animals, the eco-tours, and the byzantine methods of conservation that evolve when our experience with wild life goes from something natural to something designed. Human-animal interaction has become a designed experience and the story of that transition, as the title of the book suggests, is sometimes dismaying and weirdly reassuring.

The folksy music from Black Prairie really makes it. I’m into “Dawn Departure, Jefferson County” myself.

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Pando Daily and The Explainer:

Did Napster hurt the music industry? Yes, but only indirectly, despite the recording industry’s claims, and in a far more disruptive way. It inspired Steve Jobs to create iTunes.

Him again?

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Cyan—them of ye olde Myst—is Kickstarting their next point-and-click adventure, titled Obduction. Like everything in the Myst series, it sports a calmly surreal art style, and Cyan has promised that the puzzles will be just as obviously obtuse.

The goal’s set at $1.1 million, which is ambitious, but they’re a third funded after just a couple days. I don’t doubt that they’ll hit their goal, at any rate; the Myst series is well-known, and a new game in that style is pretty exciting.

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His subtitle says it all.

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It’s been incredible to see the response to The Fullbright Company’s recent Gone Home. There’ve been a ton of essays and responses—so many that trying to say something new/insightful is basically an exercise in futility. But then we’d never get anywhere at all. So:

Moleskine: £15 sketch book you’re too afraid to draw in. They saw you coming.

John Allison.

I see a lot of notebooks at work. Everyone’s got a notebook. It’s usually a Moleskine. And everyone always has a pen at hand. In meetings, I constantly see the latter poised over the former, ready to jot. Five minutes later, the writing device has been abandoned—tucked behind an ear, maybe (in sheepish admittance to the idea-not-practice-ness of the whole thing). Some stubborn fools will leave the writing device out, laid to rest upon the page; or maybe they’ll fidget with it, bang the tip around on this surface and that, like the words just need some jostling.

It wounds me, but I do this too. Constantly. I’ve been wondering why. I suspect I have an answer.

Notebooks used to be a precious thing. To me, anyway, they were a precious thing. Yeah, I’ll admit it. I treasured my notebooks. I had a Moleskine or two—or three—or four. I wrote in them, in tiny handwriting with meticulously practiced letterforms.[1] They were legendary notebooks, if the ad copy is to be believed. They inevitably led to great art. I guarded them jealously, treated the pages like gold leaf, and was loathe to make any wasteful mark.[2]

These days, I have the opposite problem, even if the net effect is the same. In the day to day trenches of adult existence, it becomes plainly obvious what one needs must sacrifice and where one’s attention must lie so that one can continue eating—such that it becomes pointless and/or counterproductive to pursue any other end, even if one of those ends had once kept the screaming at bay. Not so long ago, I was paralyzed by the potential of language; now I can barely see the virtue.

I suspect I am the member of a very limited group of people over the age of six who have actually practiced their cursive. ↩
I have never used up every page of a Moleskine. Ever. ↩

He writes:

This is not, by the way, some prissy thing about proper manners. Fuck that shit. I’m not trying to squash your voice. This is about quality and trust.

I trust basically no one at my job.

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Hey kind of important Some housekeeping: The URL has changed; it’s about time to retire the ol’ kitty lumpkins name. The name’ll always have a special place in my dumb stupid heart (and in myriad easter eggs, one assumes), but one cannot help but acknowledge the certain lack of, cough, gravitas about the name. So, then, now we have solitonic.co—there is no good reason for this name, except I was thinking about Metal Gear Solid when I registered it. So then.

The old URL will probably work indefinitely, but the RSS feed will certainly break one day[1] unless you update to this new one. I know, I know, this is a huge pain, especially in the wake of the Google Reader apocalypse. But with any luck, the RSS URL won’t change now, even if the underlying RSS provider does. This should be the last time you or I need to do this, hopefully.

Resubscribe?

So then 1. Have we ever talked about talked about pens?

I have this thing about pens.

No, I don’t really mean some kind of love affair for pens. I could well have one of those, but that’s not what I’m talking about, specifically, here. Let me put it like this:

Think about running. Not the act of running, but the habit, more like—the exercise, the concept. Every single one of us knows we should go running, and so we do things like read Wikipedia articles about running and pore over running shoe reviews for hours, and eventually we spend too much money on shoes, thinking, “Yes, this is an investment that will pay off. I’ll feel too guilty otherwise!” Then we don’t wear them. We don’t run. And maybe we feel guilty, but only until we find something else to do, which is always.

So, then, me. And pens.[2] And, more to the point, writing. 2. Needless to say, but I think I owe you all something. Again. Not the first time, definitely. And not the last time, certainly. 3. Much has been said about Porpentine’s wonderful, wonderful Twine game Howling Dogs in these many months since its release, and I do not believe I can add anything particularly new or novel. I can just start making noise about it. So, done. 4. I’ve been thinking about bread, and the making thereof. I’ve been known to make a loaf from time to time. Horrible, dense, salty loaves. I’m not very good. But I might get better.

Bread is—not hard, really, but not easy, particularly. Baking is, after all, kind of a science. The recipes are prescribed, and the result is generally predictable. One does not simply go off recipe. But then there are people who go off recipe, because through a combination of work and—more importantly—work, they have become better bakers than (possibly) you or (definitely) I could ever hope to be. For the layman baker, this is as good as sorcery. But this is bread in the abstract. I am trying to talk about bread as a thing. 5. And this is vital, because bread is fundamentally a thing. Bread is no good if it isn’t firm and graspable. The purpose and innate goodness of bread comes from its tangibility.

Bread can be a means, sure, but it’s also its own end. It is its own end in a way that (say) sales commission software or (say) a multinational consulting company can never be. The latter are a means of living. But they are not what really keeps you alive.

Occupy Cubicle Things haven’t really changed that much since last year. I would probably call it a focusing—like a microscope, the constituent elements seem bigger, but they are still the same constituent elements. Last year I was mildly dissatisfied and uncertain what I was supposed to do next; this year I am largely dissatisfied and uncertain what I’m supposed to do next. Howling still.

(but probably not today) ↩
Or, also, blogging software. Or text editors. I have so many iPad text editors. ↩

Microsoft’s E3 presentation was fucking disgusting.

See also.

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I don’t know if you remember, but I really like this game.

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Leigh Alexander on the Xbox One announcement:

The beginning salvo of the theoretical “You” at the center of the living room experience took me back to 2006, where we all giggled a little when Time Magazine’s person of the year was “You,” complete with mirror on the front of the print magazine. That wasn’t long after the Xbox 360’s late 2005 launch. The world has changed a lot since then, but you wouldn’t know it to look at the presentation.

Now that everyone’s announced and/or released their consoles, I think Nintendo got it most “right”.[1] Maybe we’ve been spoiled by iPhones and iPads and devices with emotional design,[2] but I don’t think we have much tolerance left for electronics that are as impersonal as a black box with an esoteric controller tethered to it. Even just two or three years ago, I would have expected and even wanted what we’re getting out of these new consoles. Now, though—I have no clue what I should have hoped for. But I know this wasn’t it.

Granted, nobody could have anticipated what our technical lives would have looked like two or three years ago, and I’m not surprised that this is how the next crop of consoles have come out—but all I’m saying is that the recent experience of playing Howling Dogs on a bus, with my iPhone, after a crushing day at work, left me a quivering, emotional wreck. Maybe it won’t make any sense—and I think I’m okay if it doesn’t—but video games are like that for me, now.

Boy, talk about a can of orthogonal worms. ↩
Jony Ive says something about industrial design that seems smart and relevant wrt. video games. Emphasis mine: ↩

There’s a lot of stuff that’s really important that you can’t distill down to a number. And I think one of the things with design is that when you look at an object you make many many decisions about it, not consciously, and I think one of the jobs of a designer is that you’re very sensitive to trying to understand what goes on between seeing something and filling out your perception of it. You know we all can look at the same object, but we will all perceive it in a very unique way. It means something different to each of us. Part of the job of a designer is to try to understand what happens between physically seeing something and interpreting it.

Video games are incredibly inscrutable when you think about it like that.

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He writes:

A couple of months ago, at 1:30 AM, I suddenly realized who should take it over. I jumped out of bed, tiptoed downstairs (no parent wants to wake a sleeping baby), and sent an email. It didn’t take much convincing, because we both knew it was a great fit.

Instapaper’s been one of the most solid, steadfast apps I’ve ever used, and it’s always found a place on my iOS home screens. I’m glad it doesn’t sound like that’s changing anytime soon.

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No words—just pictures. (And ice cream.)

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Aaron Diaz of Dresden Codak fame:

Clockwork Empire is set 2,000 years after Twilight Princess, and is not a reboot, but simply another iteration in the Zelda franchise. It just so happens that in this case, Zelda is the protagonist.

I especially like the Gauntlet of Gamelon concept.

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Leigh Alexander has some advice:

Everything becomes easier when you’re drinking. Writing is a process during which production is organic and intellect needs to be assumed or taken for granted. You cannot write if you’re thinking too much, or if you falsely believe there are some kinds of ‘decisions’ to be made regarding your topic or angle of approach. If you drink you stop thinking and your hands drum the keys with the faultless, rapid cadence of the sort of clear, light-starved spiders that live in the least-lit crevices of the world. Your brain glides with the surety of the oceanic trenches’ blind eels.

Worked for Hemingway.[1]

It did not work for Hemingway. ↩

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Everything gets bitter and hopeful. Like you never know about the couple across the street–like if they’re a couple, e.g. He’s acting like she’s the coolest person he’s ever talked to (and with his outfit, well—I thought only middle schoolers wore cargos and oversized tees—heck, he certainly looks like a middle schooler). She’s all cigarette exhales (nose mouth nose mouth mouth nose) and al fresco cafe occupancy. Coffee? No, thank you.

Later: bus. My knee hurts like hell. A pair of girls gossip—super mad at everything. “I’m the one who has the right to be angry,” she concludes. Which is interesting. No one has the right, specifically speaking, to be angry—an ever-present option isn’t a right—but as I spend eight to ten hours a day waffling between occupational impotence and anesthetized impotence, I really don’t have the moral ground to be telling people what is and isn’t right. Although you work with what you’ve got. Some people get angry. Still—water. I get angry, probably too often. Still—water. You work with what you’ve got. Sometimes you give three bucks to a busker who hasn’t made a cent today. Sometimes you get Channing Marshall and Iggy Pop to tell you what you want to believe so bad. Sometimes you get to hold nail-bitten hands. Most times you just want to feel, despite all the rancid sardine cans and sticky vermouth bottles, like you did something good.

Let’s talk pixels.

In the wake of Steubenville, The Belle Jar thinks about how to how to think and talk about the victims:

The “wives, sisters, daughters” line of argument comes up all the fucking time. …

It defines women by their relationships to other people, rather than as people themselves. It says that women are only important when they are married to, have given birth to, or have been fathered by other people. It says that women are only important because of who they belong to.

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Persepolis is one of the finer reflections on growing up and discovering where you belong. Shameful indeed.

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It takes two players and two sixteen-button controllers, and like everything that Takahashi has touched, it sounds totally charming.

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Seems the critical reception of last year’s Little Inferno was decidedly mixed. One gets the sense that reviewers did not appreciate being beaten over the head with the game’s theme. (One also wonders if they’d have gotten the message at all if the game hadn’t.)

Even without the game’s final act, though, there’s this one moment that really just sums the entire game up brilliantly.

As many a summary will tell you, Little Inferno is a game about buying things, putting them in a fireplace, and then setting them on fire. This gets the player coins, which allows them to buy things, put them in a fireplace, and then set them on fire. Etc. etc. etc.

Somewhat early on, the player can buy a moon, and it’s the first time that something really interesting happens. I mean, every item does something interesting when the player sets it ablaze—there’s a regular stream of a quirkyness throughout. But the moon is expensive, the first really expensive thing that the player buys; it has gravity, and everything else in the fireplace will orbit around it, and it’s cool. It’s new and totally unexpected, the first time it gets dragged into the fireplace. So but then the player sets it on fire. Because that’s what the game’s about. But even that’s alright, because while it burns, it’s brilliant and bright and solar—

And then it burns out and everything falls to the ground with a dull thud.

Then the player can play with the ashes.

Then they have to burn something else.

Because that’s all the game is.[1]

Breathe in the flaming potpourri.

Well—not exactly all. ↩

Laurie Penny, eloquent as always:

Every view comes from somewhere, and who you are as a writer, reporter, filmmaker or blogger changes how people behave in your presence. It changes what they say to you; it changes whether they speak to you at all. That’s as true for your average white dude reporter as it is for anyone else, and it matters even if you don’t care a bit about equal representation in the media industry. It matters because the fallacy of bland and faceless reporting hurts journalism, by allowing bias and prejudice to masquerade as hands-off objectivity, by giving reporters license not to be honest about how their outlook affects their output.

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The app’s been out for a month, barely. Jesus Christ.

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Initial reaction: Aw, Google. Why you got to go do a thing like that?

But it’s been a couple days since the announcement, and the discussion’s been pretty interesting. And while I still think this is going to be frustrating for users while we pack up and wait for everything to go down, as Brent Simmons (and many others) have said, developers have a great shot here. Nature, vacuums, etc.

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How about that.

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Pauline swings a mean hammer.

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In response to Anita Sarkeesian disabling comments on her recent Tropes vs. Women video, video blogger TheAmazingAtheist says:

We, the audience, are not allowed to have an opinion, it seems.

Jesus Christ.

There’s room for discussion and dissent. This video response is proof of that. Anita Sarkeesian did not shut down the Internet.

TheAmazingAtheist’s argument is nothing but a red herring. YouTube comments are irrelevant. If Sarkeesian’s critics genuinely wanted talk about the portrayal of women in video games, then they would.

What was Google’s motto again? Don’t be—don’t be—that is—uh…[1]

Florian Mueller at FOSS Patents, in response to Marco’s post, adds: ↩

Google’s business model is not a perpetual motion machine: by copying Apple’s user interface (Android was originally designed to be more BlackBerry-like), by copying many thousands of lines from the Java source code, or by building a key feature of Google Maps on technology that actually belongs to Microsoft, Google makes other companies’ creations (even if it still develops a lot of code around it) available “for free” to end users, but once everything others have invested in has been copied, who will invest in the next wave of innovation? (Other than Google with its advertising-centric business model.)

It’s not a great trend. What the heck happened to The Great Nerd Hope?

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Kentucky Route Zero is a five-part road trip through the soul-sick nighttime highways of the Bluegrass State.

Really been looking forward to seeing this series’ release. This first part runs some twenty-odd minutes, but it provides a great reality check and is well worth your time.

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I mean, he is mad:

Punk-founded doubt and fear has directly spawned the cowardly culture of modern irony. Fear of being called out or targeted for enjoying art that doesn’t meet the stringent criteria of punkness—a criteria too ineffable to codify, but pernicious and deadly to underestimate—has given us no outlet for the vagaries of our taste but to claim that we enjoy the things we love only out of mocking disdain for the awfulness we pre-emptively ascribe to them. The very act of loving something ironically is an admission that punk-rock groupthink has denied us our own will. Scorn has become the ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail, distancing us from joy to the point that our souls rebel. Punk has encouraged us to hate innocence until the only entertainments we can appreciate are the fake epiphanies of celebrity weight-loss porn and cynical folk-revival banjo music that borders on thoughtcrime. …

To the degree that punk has a governing philosophy, it’s a fundamentally negative one. Punk only tells us what it hates. It has never stood for anything; it stands against things. It is not an intentional indictment; it is a reactionary spasm.

I like when John Roderick is mad.

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Chris Hecker recently started rolling out closed-beta invitations for SpyParty, his competitive multiplayer game of perception and deception. As per the manual:

The Spy: One player chooses to be the Spy. The Spy player takes control of a character at the party, and tries to blend in with the normal party social behaviors, while also trying to accomplish espionage missions. The Spy’s game is one of performance and deception, and staying cool under pressure.

The Sniper: The other player becomes the Sniper, observing the party, trying to figure out which character is the Spy by looking for various “tells” and suspicious behavior. The Sniper can then choose to shoot the suspected Spy, or simply let the timer run out if he or she is confident the Spy did not accomplish the missions. The Sniper’s game is about perception, managing your attention as a resource, and making consequential decisions with incomplete information.

A preorder for $15 puts you on the early access-list to the beta, with an open beta slated to arrive in the near future. I like the idea of deeply asymmetrical multiplayer games like this, so SpyParty’s been on my radar for months and months and months. An invitation arrived in my inbox just a couple days ago. I can’t wait to get my head blown off for playing grab-ass with the ambassador.

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Jina Moore at Salon, on domestic abuse, blaming the victim, and journalist intervention:

Commenters at Time think Sara is unethical for not trying to stop the beating. They accuse her of voyeurism; of choosing “an awesome photo spread over critically need help”; of lacking empathy; of exploiting children.

It matters little in such heated discussions whether any of this is true – or demonstrably untrue (as much of it was when the comments were made). One example: Sara called 911. All of that takes a back seat, in these heated comments threads, to something much easier and more visceral: righteous blame. …

Abuse may have accomplices (e.g., drugs, alcohol) and catalysts (e.g., a bad day at work, a fight with the kid) but whatever context clings to the commission of abuse does not change something many of us apparently still can’t easily admit: Abuse is committed by abusers, who alone are responsible for their violence.

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John Allison of Bad Machinery muses on the future of web comics and creating for the web:

Comics like mine used to build followings through a system of patronage and word of mouth via links from other comics, popular blogs - in essence, journalistic models. The barrier to entry, pathetically low compared to the agonies of making one’s niche work known pre-Internet, still required a certain amount of negotiation. You had to be able to make a website. You had to do a bit of networking. You had to be able to FTP something. You had to put in a modest amount of effort.

A few years later, we have Tumblr.

Crank and crank and crank and crank.

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Versu is a new iPad game from Emily Short and Richard Evans—though kind of less of a game and more of a conversation engine, really, if that makes any sense. It’s a ton of fun to goof off in; the app’s free, so if you have an iPad, you don’t have an excuse for not playing with it—and I’m not saying that just because I have tremendous respect for Short’s talents as a game designer.[1]

On her blog, Short’s posting a series of articles about Versu’s design; the most recent focuses on how the conversations work:

In a multi-agent story, conversation flow has to be explicitly controlled; we have to track whose turn it is to talk next (if anyone’s), enforce rules of topicality; we have to give characters the option to interrupt others, and appropriate responses if they do so.

In addition, conversation in Versu scenes needs to be interleaved with other character behavior. Characters might be talking while dancing, or eating dinner, or during a fight; so we need to provide to make conversation flow around the other social activities that are occurring at the same time.

It does lay bare some of the smoky-mirror-y stuff that makes Versu tick, so maybe don’t read the above until you’ve played the game. Still, the design’s fascinating, and the project itself is ambitious. Big fan.

I will admit that it was while playing interactive fiction—Emily Short’s games in particular, and Savoir-Faire specifically—almost a decade ago that I first realized that people actually think about how games work. ↩

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Mark Hurst:

The key experiential question of Google Glass isn’t what it’s like to wear them, it’s what it’s like to be around someone else who’s wearing them. I’ll give an easy example. Your one-on-one conversation with someone wearing Google Glass is likely to be annoying, because you’ll suspect that you don’t have their undivided attention. And you can’t comfortably ask them to take the glasses off (especially when, inevitably, the device is integrated into prescription lenses). Finally – here’s where the problems really start – you don’t know if they’re taking a video of you.

Well—

It’s not a stretch to imagine that you could immediately be identified by that Google Glass user who gets on the bus and turns the camera toward you. Anything you say within earshot could be recorded, associated with the text, and tagged to your online identity. And stored in Google’s search index. Permanently.

Okay, but—

I’m still not done.

Shit.

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I have fond memories of playing The Longest Journey and Dreamfall as a kid; I don’t remember many games that held as much magic—not the kind with bang-zoom explosions, but the important kind—and epic good-versus-evil adventuring as this series, and certainly none with as big of a cliffhanger. You can guess my excitement at hearing about Ragnar Tørnquist’s new studio announcing a Kickstarter for the sequel, Dreamfall Chapters.

Very nice.

Tørnquist[1] and his team have been away from the series for a long time, but between my nostalgia and what I saw from The Secret World—itself wholly flawed and not especially interesting to play, but compelling just to look at and talk to characters in (which is the extent of a point-and-click adventure)—I am wildly, foolishly hopeful.

Man what the heck is that little slashed “o” character? That thing is fun to have around. ↩

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Mailbox is a free mail app for iPhone. It downloads your messages to a secondary cloud server before the messages hit your phone. I have no idea how they’re making money. This can’t possibly go wrong.[1]

The app is really slick, though, and the way it does GTD with email is solid. I’m finding it a bit fiddly to make it work with OmniFocus, just because I’ve made it a point to turn OmniFocus into my only source when I go to look at what I have to do for the day, and now having to split to-do tasks between two places is—well, fiddly. ↩

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Turns out there’s a couple ways to convince courts to discharge student debt:

While certain cancers and diseases require cutting off limbs, the best way to force an amputation is to let a simple infection fester—into gangrene. Although hands are more important for the completion of most work-related tasks, missing legs are more visually striking and potentially more persuasive to a judge.

Handy.

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Winter in Proteus does not sing, as much as it jangles, whispers, heaves. It’s dark and dreary and the trees remind me of medusa heads. The days of summer owls and chirping mushrooms are long gone. But despite how blasted and apocalyptic it looks, it’s still awake. It rumbles and shivers. And even in stillness, the world breathes.

Customers lose most of their storage space.

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DecodeDC recently ran a retrospective on the SOPA protests. Supremely insightful, informative, and hopeful.

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Rab of Rock Paper Shotgun reviews Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective:

“Watson, this is not a board game. This is something very special indeed. This is…an experience. An opportunity to live and breathe in the London of Sherlock Holmes and his lover Watson! “

“Holmes, I am not-“

“Let me detail the contents of this box. Inside you will find ten different case files. Each book introduces a case, and then moves onto a section full of paragraphs relevant to visits you might make through the course of your investigation. There is also a map of London. Each building is given a unique code – as you choose to visit a building, you refer to a paragraph in the case file. You see?! There is also a directory of London people and places. Again – should you wish to visit any of these people, you need only refer to the relevant paragraph and find out what you discovered. And finally – Oh! Watson, this does excite me so! – there are newspapers from the London of the day. You will have to pore over these newspapers to find clues, inconsistencies and new leads!”

Sounds like a blast.

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Leigh Alexander:

The dialogue’s been great, but the end result – a day of circulating a hashtag on Twitter – runs the risk of catching fire with people who miss the point. #Objectify is not about celebrating objectification or about making people feel uncomfortable, but I’m increasingly worried that point will be lost and that harm can be done.

It’s a bit of a shame, but then again, I think it already did what it was supposed to, albeit on a smaller scale; the point was never to just use the hashtag.

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Adventure game Kentucky Route Zero has a fantastic promo website. And I’m getting #sworcery flashbacks, which can only be a good thing.

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Never has a social network so quickly reached its pinnacle.[1]

cf. ↩

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I don’t even like Jonathan Coulton, but this is so shitty.

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Advice.

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Emily Gera gives us this lovely simulation:

Often you think to yourself, “what ever happened to all the men?” Once prized for everything from inventing snooker to the Yorkie bar, the population of men on the Internet is now under attack by the pastel-draped world of women whose shirts don’t even have 50 percent opacity. When you are alone at night and can’t sleep because of all the estrogen in the air you think about how besieged you are by injustice and inequality as a white man.

Luckily, we’ll have next Friday’s Objectify A Male Tech Writer Day to be equally insane and absurd, but without the misfortune of having to drink from the cesspool of human trash that is the Kotaku comments section.[1][2]

Man I mean I know the writers and comment moderators try, but Jesus. ↩
Incidentally, if you’re not totally sold by #objectify (har), Patrick Miller has a good writeup on why it’s important and how it could really work, which is worth thinking about. ↩

Sometimes I wish I was this optimistic.

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Ugh.

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Laurie Penny responds to a vile article in The Observer.

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Like any good productivity system, Tyler Reinhard’s Semantic Notes are both obvious and awesome.

Update: Years later, the original article no longer exists. Here, if nothing else, are the symbols as originally described:

- (hyphen) for unordered lists
(asterisk)* for checklists
? (question mark) for help files
_ (underscore) for unprocessed scratch notes
@ (at symbol) for tweets on deck
¶ (pilcrow) for paragraphs and snippet strings
¢ (cent sign) for code
§ (section mark) for final work, or text not to be edited
# (octothorp) for subjects to remember, inversely graduated for importance
ø (slashed o)** for outlines

Does Tyler Reinhard still use these? Does he remember that brief moment when a bunch of nerds got real excited about annotating plaintext note titles?

Well, who even knows. What I can tell you, if you're still into the plaintext notes thing, is that the fundamental idea--use plaintext notes, and prefix the filename of the note with a symbol indicating what kind of note it is---remains promising.

But the specifics of Reinhard's implementation have become rather less so. Using such adornments (or at least these specific adornments) introduces friction, enough that I've long since given up on them. If you're writing snippets and drafts on iOS, as much of the intended audience for this thing probably is, how do you type a pilcrow? (You can't.) If you're running with GTD, do you really want to spend part of your review on reading your dozen-plus unprocessed notes, and painstakingly updating that symbol? (Not that second part, anyway.) Can any one person determine that a particular note is so important that it deserves one octothorp as opposed to two? (Madness!) Do you actually care that much about your tweets? (lol)

The point is, "semantic" notes are much fussier than you'd expect from the premise. And fussy things tend to serve the purpose of fussiness---that's part of their charm. (C.f. the defunct app Birdhouse, Wes Anderson, etc.) But the primary purpose of a notetaking system is not to fulfill a base level of fussiness; it's to exist as the slimmest possible translation layer between your brain and where the contents of your brain are stored.

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Ian Bogost:

The actual use, function, or content of games never has a place in political discussions about games. Instead, games are cogs in someone’s favorite discourse machine. Not just negative ones like gun violence, but also apparently beneficial ones: a commitment to STEM education, a generic technological wherewithal, an empathy with the social practices younger voters, and so on. Whether for good or for ill, games become instruments in public debate rather than as mechanisms through which players can participate in a variety of activities—including reflecting on the very debates they now serve as puppets.

This is one of those things that’s so cynical, so profound and yet so obvious, that there has to be some truth behind it.

So while I think it’s encouraging that video games could have a place in the political discourse, I don’t think engaging in a gun control debate on the NRA’s terms is a good idea. At. All. For. Anyone. And like the article alludes to, by even dignifying the NRA’s with a rebuttal, the article, like this blog post, is allowing for the possibility that there is indeed a relationship between gun violence and video games.

So.

But the thing that always kind of gets me is that there’s a certain amount of gun fetishization in any first person shooter. There’s customization in basically all modern FPSs, so you can have your very own special piece, with the thing in the stock, even. And guns are satisfying in video games; countless hours are poured into the muzzle flash, the bangs, the ejecting brass—do video games still have ejecting brass?—to ensure that the mere act of firing a gun in a video game is fun—you don’t even have to hit anything!

And then you had shit last year with EA partnering with weapons dealers to promote their latest pile of a manshoot, and I mean, I just, I don’t even. What?

So, okay, maybe the NRA is on to something. The games industry likes guns. Guns cause violence. Solution: fewer guns.

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Jill Lepore for The New Yorker:

One in three Americans knows someone who has been shot. As long as a candid discussion of guns is impossible, unfettered debate about the causes of violence is unimaginable. Gun-control advocates say the answer to gun violence is fewer guns. Gun-rights advocates say that the answer is more guns: things would have gone better, they suggest, if the faculty at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Chardon High School had been armed. That is the logic of the concealed-carry movement; that is how armed citizens have come to be patrolling the streets. That is not how civilians live. When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.

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After what may have been a particularly trying week of self-doubt and ambiguity, one can only hope that a pair of musical Koreans will cheer you up.

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For the first time in five years, there's a new A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible.

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Patricia Hernandez, writing on how the game Fallout 2 changed her life:

It all seems so appropriate, now. The village my character is from is “backwards”–like, spear-holding, ritual-performing type archaic. My half “indian” family crawled out of a jungle deep in El Salvador with a machete. They’re all fervent believers of Christianity, shamanism, and strict gender roles. Most didn’t have an education past first grade, if that. So when my elder in Fallout 2 told me that the fate of the entire village rested on my shoulders, it wasn’t a tired video game cliche to me. It felt like a role I already knew, what with my family banking on the idea that I’d be the one that got an education, I’d be the one that’d go out and earn six figures (which I’d give to the family), and I’d be the one that would sponsor everyone for citizenship.

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Marco Arment:

Remember when Twitter said that client-app developers would need to “work with us directly” and “need our permission” to exceed 100,000 user-login tokens?

Well, now we know what that means.

Spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well.

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David Hellman (artist of the beautiful, heartbreaking, heartbreakingly hiatical webcomic A Lesson is Learned but the Damage Is Irreversible) and Tevis Thompson are wrapping up their Kickstarter for Second Quest, a Legend of Zelda-inspired comic; about ten hours left until it closes. In typical Hellman fashion, the art looks killer—I’m pledging the heck out of this.

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To the Moon is a point and click adventure from Freebird Games.

Starring two memory doctor-technician-whatevers, the pair specialize in rearranging the memories of the dying to grant them one final wish. To the Moon sees the doctors on their latest assignment with an elderly man named Johnny—to fulfill his dream, they have to backtrack through his memories, and find a way to send him to, well, the moon.

It’s a premise that has more than a bit in common with the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But while that work concerns the destruction of memories, To the Moon is revolves around their creation and ultimately has little of the melancholy that pervades Eternal Sunshine. Really, in stories about final wishes, there’s a danger of going to the extreme opposite of the spectrum and getting overly sentimental and sappy, and To the Moon regretfully does both at times. Possibly to preempt criticism on this count, one of the doctors acts as the voice of reason and cynicism (and eventually—and maybe a little predictably—proves to have a heart of gold), and naturally points out just how sappy things are getting. Self awareness is great, but it won’t fix everything, you guys!

Though admittedly, I may have wept a bit at other times. A lip may have quivered. There may not have been a dry eye in the house. In a desperate attempt to preserve my manly dignity, I’ll say that the moments were brief. But they were there, yes.

So—sometimes a mixed bag, but for the most part, To the Moon hits its story beats, and it hits most of them well, especially for a tale that’s basically being told backwards, Memento style; that takes some doing. You can see pretty much every twist and turn before they happen, but they’re executed well, and the game doesn’t indulge itself overly long on the sentimentality or melodrama or tragedy of those moments; things move along at a good clip. The game’s simple puzzles never block the player from moving through the story, either, so most of the gameplay involves wandering through Johnny’s memories and watching things play out. And while the pixel art is simple, it’s also remarkably expressive—big fan of the side-eyes sprite, myself.

Plus, the game has this one certain really compelling piano melody on its soundtrack, and it knows it, and it milks it for nearly all its worth.[1]

To the Moon is most compelling when it’s thinking about the nature of memories. There is, of course, a brief diversion into whether or not rearranging Johnny’s memories is in his best interest, and that one gets wrapped up quite nicely—a little too pat for my taste, frankly, but there you are. Along with this, though, is a question that never really gets addressed, but I think would be interesting for a future installment:[2] is memory rearrangement in everybody else’s best interest? Johnny’s new moon-memory restores this one particularly charming memory that he’d lost as a child—so he gets closure—but ultimately there’s still the tragic story of his wife[3] and their relationship and the fact that Johnny’s wife dies with an unresolved and closureless question/obsession regarding rabbits, all of which remains tragic because she doesn’t get a do-over. One of the doctor-technician-whatevers notes that she’s not their patient—she is dead, after all—so maybe this is some quick commentary about how what’s done is done and that people have to move past tragedy.

But that feels kind of like a cop out. It’s fine, I guess, if the perfectly rearraged memory exists only in the dying person’s mind—but isn’t there something kind of incomplete and dissatisfying about that? I think the memory-rearrangement-for-the-dying premise has the opportunity to think about some pretty big questions on conflicts between what the dying want and what their survivors want, and (more broadly and less death-relatedly) the doubled-edged nature of memories. It’d’ve been heady stuff to tackle on a first installment, but I hope this a direction that they’re headed towards.

And even if it isn’t, To the Moon makes for a good tearjerker, and a promising start to the series regardless—I’m looking forward to what comes next.

The best of these musical interludes occurs while the player’s running rapid-fire through a series of jumbled, broken memory fragments and catches sight of Johnny seated at a piano, a pair of ghostly dancers swaying next to him, music and hearts swelling in equal measure. ↩
The epilogue of this game basically guarantees that a sequel is at least in the works. ↩
Spoiler alert: Johnny has a wife with a fairly tragic story arc. It ends like all fairly tragic stories. ↩

There are some pretty good reasons to re-elect Barack Obama (even if he’s not perfect), but since you’re reading this on the Internet, I think Nilay Patel’s got a pretty relevant one:

And make no mistake, the broadband industry is doing everything in its power to subvert the existing rules and bring us ever closer to these worst-case hypotheticals: Comcast excuses its own Xbox video app from counting against its data caps, while Netflix rings up the meter. If you don’t have a Verizon phone, you can’t watch videos on NFL.com, since Verizon and the NFL have a deal in place that restricts access to other carriers. AT&T is forcing iPhone owners to upgrade to new, more expensive data plans in order to use FaceTime over cellular connections. The list goes on.

This is not some liberal fantasy nightmare—this is happening now.

In other news: Mitt Romney has a very tiny face.

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“Trying to talk somebody out of the stuff that they enjoy in life is like trying to talk them out of their faith or their sexuality. It’s a pointless exercise that can never be anything but acrimonious and will only highlight unnecessary amounts of difference about things that ultimately don’t really matter. Buy the steak you like, worship the god you love, neck with the people that you treasure, and don’t worry about the numbers.”

— Merlin Mann

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So a boy walks into a bookstore… A good while ago, the girlfriend and I embarked on what turned out to be an abortive attempt to watch through the entirety of the Lord of the Rings movies (not the extended versions—nobody has that much free time). We got through one, and even that took more than one sitting. I suspect that this is not atypical.

If you’re anything like me—and why wouldn’t you be?—then even prior to the initial release of the movies, you hadn’t read the books for many a year. The last time, in fact, may have very well been the first time, ever. If you are especially like me, then the first/last read was in your awkward middle school years.

I myself had a four volume box set of the series—The Hobbit, The Fellowship, and the rest—published 1983 by Del Rey. The paperbacks came in a garish purple box, and the covers of each featured some campy ’80s fantasy art, the same kind you expect on the cover of Conan the Barbarian novels.[1] I didn’t know at the time, being so young, but these editions were riddled with misprints and errors and terribly outdated even by the time I bought them in the early 2000s.

Still, it was high fantasy, and as far as high fantasy went, they amply satisfied the escapist needs of a quiet teenager who wanted to play Dungeons and Dragons but didn’t have the social skills to organize a group. I’d made it a point to stuff whichever volume I was reading into my backpack every morning, and pull it out whenever I could throughout the day—after rushing through tests,[2] during lunch, at any free moment. And when I reached the end of the story proper, I read the appendices and studied the maps and family trees. So, yes, Readership. I was That Kid.[3] I was not much fun to be around, frankly. And keeping your nose in a book is not an especially good way to talk to people. But it helps a little, when kids at school make fun of you for reading so much.

But I had to be finished with them eventually, and I put them away. I started talking to people, just a little at first, and then not much more than that. The movies came out some years later, and I grudgingly admitted that they did a fine job, a fine job indeed, even if they did take out Tom Bombadil and the Scouring of the Shire,[4] and Peter Jackson’s epic fantasy-movie track record is good enough at this point that I am even looking forward to seeing The Hobbit.[5]

The thing about reading something like The Lord of the Rings as a kid is that one loses out on a lot. Like a lot a lot. I’d always found the seemingly endless singing unbearable, for example, and I’d largely written off Return of the King as a textbook.[6] The core story—classic good versus evil—remained compelling, though. And given the abortive movie marathon attempt, and with the Hobbit trilogy (!!!) coming up soon-ish, the time seemed right to give the ol’ series another go.

Since I’m apparently an adult now and have implicit permission from society to spend money on stupid things, I decided I wouldn’t put up with my outdated mass market paperbacks anymore. Or, for that matter, any mass market paperbacks. I wanted a more luxurious edition. Something that looked imposing on bookshelves and screamed, “I am a nerd who likes to spend money on stupid things.” Houghton Mifflin graciously sells the 50th Anniversary Edition for just such a need.

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A book in a box This edition packages up The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King into one volume. It comes in a box, in case the brown cardboard that Amazon ships it in is found lacking. Both book and box are bound in plasticky faux-leather, which, despite aforementioned plastickyness, has a pleasant soft-touch texture. It has a smoky, grainy look up close, and makes the whole set look adequately intimidating from a distance.

The box makes it a point to say which edition it contains.

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Which I find tacky. The medium is message enough.

The cover of the book proper is stamped with two-color foil, showing the Eye of Sauron and the inscription of the One Ring, plus the Three Rings. Nice touch: Gandalf’s ring Narya bears a bit of orange-red and sits between the flames, as is appropriate. Naturally, the title appears on the spine—gold and orange foil for that. Tolkien’s signature is stamped on the back, and looks suspiciously elvish. Page edges are also gilded, ensuring that the maximum amount of foil is used in each copy’s manufacture.

To no one’s surprise, the book is cussedly heavy, which makes the physical act of reading, especially for extended periods of time, difficult. This thing is definitely made for showing off. Plus side: you’ll have fit forearms afterwards. In fact, the book is so big that, once you take it out of the box, it will not fit back in without effort.

The pages are matte-smooth and a pleasant cream color. Print quality is good—text is crisp and easy on the eyes. I’ll take a wild stab and say that the typeface looks a lot like Garamond, but I may just be saying that to impress you. The maps are huge and look excellent as well.

This volume also uses continuous page numbering, for maximal satisfaction when you tell your friends that you’ve just finished reading a 1000+ page book. Then they’ll look at your embarrassingly huge forearms and know the truth, and you’ll feel ashamed.

As for the story and text itself—well, the former’s been discussed ad nauseum, so let’s just move on.

The text is no doubt going to be considered by the publisher as the most accurate version, as it hews as close to authorial intent as anyone can guess. I’ve noted a couple misprints, though, just minor misspellings. With a text as voluminous as this, that’s to be expected. On the other hand, it seems like typos are something that somebody would have caught at some point. But it still looks nice in its box. So then—for showing off, rather than reading.

Which I think brings us to the heart of the matter Let’s face it—you probably don’t really want to spend something in the neighborhood of $85 (at time of publication) on this, do you? It weighs nearly five pounds. It’s a fantasy novel, and it weighs five pounds. Come on, grognard. It might look nice on your shelf. It is probably not worth the cost for most use cases. And it feels a little bit like cheap pandering.

Okay, but you know what? I’ve been pandered. I like this edition. I like the huge maps, even if it feels like I’m about to accidentally tear them out when I unfold them, and I like the (frankly excessive) amount of foil. I also like that it comes in a box. A book! In a box! What?!**

Not to mention, I like the story. I read it for the first time in years, and enjoyed it even more, despite my inadequate (but now mighty) forearms. I was super into it. I’d forgotten how much I’d liked it when I was fourteen and got pushed around a lot for liking this kind of thing, and didn’t really have any friends, and didn’t especially enjoy being around other people.

So here’s the thing: It isn’t immediately obvious to fourteen year-olds like past-yt., but The Lord of the Rings is filled with tremendous melancholy. Sure, there are hobbits and dwarves and elves and wizards, and generally everyone spends a lot of time singing and embarking on adventures. But it’s a story about destroying the one thing—as evil and terrible as that one thing is—that keeps magic in the world. And not even the wizardy throwing-fireballs kind, strictly, but the kind that keeps trees beautiful and gives courage to very small people in very dark places.

Once that thing is gone, so is the magic. The elves leave across the western sea. The dwarves retreat to their underground kingdoms. The hobbits establish the British Empire. Fourteen year-olds become twenty three-year olds. The magic fades. It has to. The world would end if it didn’t.

But the hobbits write a book so that they don’t forget about it.

And a twenty three year-old buys it so that he doesn’t either.

This particular cover of The Hobbit featured Gollum as a kind of amphibious lizard-insect-man horror, with pale green, multifaceted eyes that were literally the size of dinner plates. The movie Gollum makes much more sense. ↩
Generally with mixed results, grade-wise. ↩
Yt. will even admit to attempting The Silmarillion, and while yt. did in fact read the entire thing, the endeavor was not what one could call successful, as very little was retained from the reading except that everyone said “yea” a lot, and that Melkor stole the Silmarils from under the nose of Eru Ilúvatar and put them in a lead box so as not to be burned by their light, if memory serves, and oh god. ↩
WHICH IS A PIVOTAL MOMENT AND REPRESENTS ARGHGHAGSDHOIKLAFS DLJK ASDAA FSDI;OASDL ; ↩
Incidentally, has anybody else heard that Bullseye interview with Benedict Cumberbatch where he describes himself as (reciting from memory here) mysterious and ethereal? What a delightful guy. ↩
He said, having just admitted to reading The Silmarillion. ↩

Planet Money recently ran an episode on the intersection of music, technology, and economics, all through the lens of everyone’s favorite horse-dance song. Quality listening.

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