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 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.

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.

1. 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.  ↩

2. 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.  ↩

3. Cue small violin.  ↩

4. For a second time: I know it’s not, but the feeling is, yet again, hard to shake.  ↩

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.

1. Have I reached that point where the word “left” looks mega weird? Left left left left left left left left left.  ↩

2. 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.  ↩

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.)

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

1. 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.  ↩

2. Not about race.  ↩

3. 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.  ↩

4. 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.  ↩

5. not a euphemism  ↩

6. I hated typing those tortured numbers as much as you hated reading them.  ↩

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.

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]

1. 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.

1. Not literally. Well…not any god you know.  ↩

2. Cue seventeen (?) eighteen contributors.  ↩

3. I ended up assigning gender to the two on account of this; I’m wondering how many other players did, too…  ↩

4. If not actually historical.  ↩

5. I peeked at the source file, and I can only assume that it was a logistical nightmare to make coherent.  ↩

6. Incl., aforementioned creepypasta aside, a piece which feels a heck of a lot like a “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.”  ↩

7. 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.  ↩

8. Yt. thought he made up “dichotomous” and was pleasantly surprised that it was in the dictionary.  ↩

9. Admittedly might be a lot to ask.  ↩

10. 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.  ↩

11. 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.  ↩

12. 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.

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.”

1. Incl. an overly long dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream that surely drew more than a little inspiration from Triangle.  ↩

2. And it really feels like exercise by the end.  ↩

3. My final-ish anime being Gurran Lagann, after which I decided that no other show would ever top in terms of anime-ness.  ↩

4. I mean, predictable, given the title, but not very interesting, thematically.  ↩

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]]> carrier signal Edmund Chu Wed, 21 May 2014 07:41:15 +0000 https://solitonic.co/blog/2014/5/21/siff-2014-chinese-puzzle 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:537c5713e4b0fd55b0cc7550

“Chapter One: He was too romantic about Manhattan, as he was about everything else. He thrived on the hustle bustle of the crowds and the traffic. To him, New York meant beautiful women and street smart guys who seemed to know all the angles. Ah, no, corny, too corny for, you know, my taste. Let me, let me try and make it more profound.”

Chinese Puzzle is less of a loveletter to New York, more a valentine to Woody Allen’s Manhattan. The parallels come fast and in abundance. Both feature New York as both a locale and a character. Both follow the travails of a middling writer in the aftermath of divorce. Both writers find themselves adrift, while the women of their lives (both have surrounded themselves with a lot of women, somehow) propel themselves ever onward. Chinese Puzzle’s Xavier, played by Romain Duris, is particularly rootless after resolving to move to New York to reconnect with his transplanted children.

It’s a setup that could really go either way on the comedy scale, but director/writer Cédric Klapisch manages to pull out a lot of charm. There’s a few culture-shock jokes, which I always find kind of shitty—e.g. Lost in Translation’s scene with the escort, which is yeah pretty funny (mostly because of Bill Murray’s delivery), but man, rude; Chinese Puzzle makes it feel all in good fun, and no one’s being scorned. Xavier’s American divorce lawyer, for example, is pretty much just a schlubby fast-talker working out of a basement office—whatever stereotype you’re imagining is basically the character—but while he’s profoundly unprofessional, he means well, and he’s not actually incompetent. Xavier himself doesn’t spend much (any?) time gawping at skyscrapers and getting hit by angry taxicabs; actually, he looks right at home almost immediately. Melting pot! (If only we were all so lucky.)

Still, life is complicated for Xavier—that’s a word that gets thrown around a lot, “complicated”—most of the running time is dedicated to Xavier finding his place in the city in various subplots: searching for a place to live, finding work (since apparently being a middling French novelist doesn’t quite cover the bills), grappling with being a sperm donor to his best friend, getting a green card (by marrying someone, obviously), spending time with his kids, etc. etc. etc.—all subplots colliding, eventually, in a truly awkward (but hilarious!) scene in Xavier’s Chinatown apartment.

Chinese Puzzle is the final film of a trilogy, and apparently most (if not all) of the cast of the previous films appear again in greater or lesser roles. Having not seen the other two films, I can say that Chinese Puzzle stands well on its own. But while the conclusion of the film sees Xavier learning to move forward again (~*~woo~*~), there’s the sense that it’s just as much about reconciliation with the past. Again, having not seen the other two parts, yr. guess is as good as mine about what reconciliation is required, and I can only imagine certain smaller moments would have been more affecting if I’d known the characters. Still, despite its own history, it doesn’t wink at itself often at all, and it feels like more than just a victory lap.

And the movie isn’t precious or sentimental.[1] Which is an easy trap for things like this, I think! It does wrap up rather neatly—one can nearly see a bow descending upon the screen as the credits roll. But while the wisdoms it espouses might be considered “simple” or “obvious,” those are often the easiest to forget. Chinese Puzzle, if nothing else, has the wisdom to know that.

1. Well, okay, except maybe at the end, with a Great American Running-To-One’s-Destiny scene. Possibly also another Manhattan homage. (The only thing this movie is missing, then, is some Gershwin.)

   Chinese Puzzle, it should also be said, actually has two scenes in which Romain Duris runs through the streets of New York.  ↩

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.

*

1. 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.  ↩

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.”

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.

1. 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.”  ↩

2. I was disproportionately proud of my word blur effect. So proud. Holy cow.  ↩

3. 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.”

1. c.f.  ↩

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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Sun, 05 Jan 2014 03:05:19 +0000 http://fannypackmafia.com/blog/2014/1/3/why-i-love-winter 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:52c8cc10e4b0df7dc79d6bc1 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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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Tue, 03 Dec 2013 04:25:34 +0000 http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/12/2/5143856/no-girls-allowed 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:529d5d3ce4b0b382fd4e8bac 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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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Wed, 27 Nov 2013 00:32:13 +0000 http://storify.com/q0rt/this-is-why-we-penny-arcading 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:52953d21e4b09daa4e4bb54f 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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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Fri, 25 Oct 2013 04:32:00 +0000 http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/10/23/adelson-obama-should-fire-nuke-to-send-message-to-iran/ 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:5268a329e4b03f4ad7d7765b

“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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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Thu, 24 Oct 2013 16:30:00 +0000 http://the-toast.net/2013/10/15/male-gamers/ 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:5268a29be4b0a6ea6c323406 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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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Thu, 24 Oct 2013 04:27:12 +0000 http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/wild-ones-live/ 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:5268a1b8e4b08d6355b4034d 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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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Mon, 21 Oct 2013 20:06:00 +0000 http://pandodaily.com/2013/08/05/who-killed-the-music-industry-an-interactive-explainer/ 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:5262e645e4b04c04f40d4855 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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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Mon, 21 Oct 2013 02:08:00 +0000 http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:5262e6b5e4b03006c79686da 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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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Sat, 19 Oct 2013 20:00:28 +0000 http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/18/4848424/fitbit-force-review 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:5262e597e4b0378afca0fa91 His subtitle says it all.

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]]> carrier signal Edmund Chu Tue, 10 Sep 2013 04:08:38 +0000 https://solitonic.co/blog/2013/9/9/gone-home-leave-a-light-on 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:522e9523e4b0a584ece4ba9a View fullsize

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:

A lot of people have mentioned the nineties nostalgia, but for me the game’s cultural touchstones don’t resonate so strongly. I am technically a child of the nineties, but it’s probably more accurate to say that I was grew up in the 2000s.[1] I don’t feel like I was much of a participant or consumer of nineties culture, at any rate; I think the events most people associate with the time—grunge, Cold War-thawing, Princess Diana[2]—came too early in my life for me to understand and/or appreciate the gravity of. I mean, god, I wasn’t even ten when the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal broke. I didn’t even know what “scandal” actually meant. (Which didn’t stop me from trying to talk about it with my fourth grade classmates.) What culture I did absorb effectively had to be blasted at max volume, directly into my ears—I’d be too busy running in circles in my parent’s backyard to pay attention otherwise. And yet the game still works! It worked on me!

Really, the thing about Gone Home I found so special wasn’t Sam’s story in particular, or the environment, or the fact that there are no guns. (But I think we can all agree that the story is compassionately told, and the environment meticulously populated, and the lack of manhunting more than a little refreshing.) Instead, it was the sheer amount of empathy the game[3] has and the fact that it takes nothing for granted.[4] It recognizes the Greenbriars as people and treats them like people. (Insane, I know.)[5] Gone Home might have tried its hand at the supernatural, or slotted in a last minute plot twist in the attic. It didn’t, because in a story about people, people are more than sufficiently extraordinary. It would have been easy to dismiss Sam’s feelings because she’s “just a teenager”; or to mock her dad for writing cheeseball sci-fi novels; or to judge her mother for trying to start a fling with a coworker. But its emotional impact is never undermined by winks or nudges,[6] because it knows that it’s totally valid to feel like an outsider when you’re growing up; to be haunted by the past; to wish for something new and exciting to free you from the confines of a life you never asked for.

The nineties nostalgia isn’t even just nostalgia, really. It’s a way of saying that we were all like this once, that we’ve all had similar experiences. It’s pretty much a universal thing to feel lonely or sad or trapped. But there’s the good things, too—the Street Fighter bouts and and the exciting new bands and the thrill of a first kiss. Gone Home reminds of these things because we’ve been where the Greenbriars have been. They’re people; they have problems that people have, and so do we. And that’s totally okay.

Admittedly, maybe that’s all too pat. Maybe the all the problems are just too easy and the the conclusion to Sam and Lonnie’s story too happy. What I mean is: Oregon still doesn’t recognize same sex marriage. And what kind of life options do two women who only have a high school educations have?

But I look at it like this: I’d much rather this than the alternative. So I’m duly glad that there was no lesbian murder-suicide—yes, the hair dye did get me, too—and that Sam and Lonnie did not have to go through a literal hell in order to find something that only barely approached contentment. Maybe that would have been more “realistic”[7]—but it would have been, frankly, bullshit[8]. I might be given over to the school of touchy-feely design, but I really find it heartening that a game with emotional lows so low can find a way to end on a high so high.[9] Mostly, it feels like we’ve suffered the same way Sam and Lonnie have at some point; maybe we can be happy like them, too.

1. And, anyway, all those nineties artifacts that litter the game—the riot grrl mix tapes, the Cobain posters—they belong to a person much, much cooler than I’ve ever been or could ever hope to be; that is, someone who wields the distant, intimidating kind of cool, the cool that you had hoped you yourself could (but would later have to admit, looking in the mirror one grim high school morning, probably wouldn’t ever) learn. I did eventually get riot grrl, though, but like a decade too late. Did I ever tell you about that? The year that I spent listening to basically nothing but early Corin Tucker and Sleater Kinney records? I was nineteen and probably should have known better (or at least diversified), but all in all I’m glad I didn’t. Goodbye, small hands, / Goodbye, small heart.  ↩

2. Or, rather, the things that I think about when I try to think of what people think of when they think about the nineties. I know that the beginnings of online culture were brewing, too—BBSs, dial up modems, AOL, all the rest—but those don’t feel like they say “nineties” to me, even though I know they’re supposed to. Basically, it’s complicated.  ↩

3. I understand that there’s been some amount of, like, debate? On what games are? That started with Proteus? And continues with this game? This is a debate that I have basically no interest in trying to continue, which is exactly why I’m going to continue it, but only enough to say that definitions are generally helpful, and Zach Gage by-way-of-Naomi-Clark has something that rings true and starts to captures the experience of video game-ness—you should click through and read. (The Howling Dogs analysis is worth it, too.) I’m not especially interested in participating in the traditional gameplay model (drama = violence + objective markers, generally speaking) since focusing on that feels counterproductive and like it’s missing the point—but it does suggest some interesting and possibly uncomfortable growing pains-type stuff—e.g., like, the Tomb Raider reboot (and don’t get me wrong, I actually respect it quite a bit for its willingness to simply try) is a failure for no other reason than because the violence and objective markers (which, by the way, are mechanically solid and satisfying and fun to do) that form the core of its gameplay stand at distinct odds with the story’s overarching theme that survival is expensive because all human life (villainous or otherwise) holds real weight. You cannot possibly take those ideas seriously while Lara Croft is unloading bullet after bullet after bullet into brain after brain after brain, basically without so much as a blink.  ↩

4. Except maybe—maybe—three ring binders. But even those have their moment.  ↩

5. I mean, think about it. This is a game about picking things up and looking at them. You might as well call the game “Objectify.”  ↩

6. But that’s also not to say that it isn’t without humor. “Whoa, Sam.”  ↩

7. What I mean to say is, I don’t feel cheated by having a sweet, hopeful ending. Gone Home has the decency to make it feel earned rather than given. It’s not even a complicated thing, why it works—it’s just (“just”) characters with actual progression and agency (ethos change, etc. etc.), not just a plot happening to them. Sam’s dramatic moments aren’t dramatic because she’s (more or less) the main character; they’re dramatic because the game spends time explaining, in some form or another, why this all matters. And you can say all you want about how the problems exist solely on micro, personal levels—but that’s the point! That’s why the story matters!  ↩

8. Whoa, SOMEone’s got opinions!  ↩

9. The whole thing with the father, Terrence, goes basically unresolved, and he and Jan effectively act as foils to Sam and Lonnie. Which might be a grim comparison to make. But.  ↩

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.

1. I suspect I am the member of a very limited group of people over the age of six who have actually practiced their cursive.  ↩

2. I have never used up every page of a Moleskine. Ever.  ↩

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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]]> carrier signal Edmund Chu Thu, 08 Aug 2013 14:19:22 +0000 https://solitonic.co/blog/2013/8/7/howling-still 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:52026897e4b02c9e7bb93c08 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.

1. (but probably not today)  ↩

2. Or, also, blogging software. Or text editors. I have so many iPad text editors.  ↩

See also.

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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Mon, 03 Jun 2013 20:59:14 +0000 http://kentuckyroutezero.com 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:51ad03bae4b09b8e60cfd6c8 View fullsize

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

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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Wed, 22 May 2013 06:38:50 +0000 http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/192709/Opinion_Xbox_One_is_a_desperate_prayer_to_stop_time.php 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:519c6789e4b0f5d11469e7a5 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.

1. Boy, talk about a can of orthogonal worms.  ↩

2. 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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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Tue, 30 Apr 2013 06:11:58 +0000 http://www.marco.org/2013/04/25/instapaper-next-generation 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:517f60b9e4b0b0f0caf37161 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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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Tue, 30 Apr 2013 05:59:14 +0000 http://bombsfall.tumblr.com/post/48997200632/a-quick-editorial-cartoon-about-the-intersection 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:517f5dbfe4b0a81a458ab821 No words—just pictures. (And ice cream.)

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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Fri, 12 Apr 2013 18:34:00 +0000 http://dresdencodak.tumblr.com/post/47724463171/inspired-by-anita-sarkeesians-video-game-tropes 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:5167ab04e4b0fdc6c239a51b 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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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Fri, 12 Apr 2013 06:05:30 +0000 http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/how-to-be-a-freelance-writer/ 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:5167a436e4b0f72706520fcb 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]

1. It did not work for Hemingway.  ↩

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]]> carrier signal Edmund Chu Wed, 10 Apr 2013 04:46:01 +0000 https://solitonic.co/blog/2013/4/9/theyll-sharpen-their-teeth-on-your-smile-iii 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:51641bb4e4b07ef0fe18183a 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.

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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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Wed, 27 Mar 2013 04:09:38 +0000 http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/25/4144958/chicago-public-schools-bans-persepolis-graphic-novel-from-schools 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:5152710ee4b0b3e0d10fb648 Persepolis is one of the finer reflections on growing up and discovering where you belong. Shameful indeed.

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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Wed, 20 Mar 2013 04:02:08 +0000 http://venuspatrol.com/2013/03/love-hygiene-monsters-introducing-tenya-wanya-teens/ 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:514931f8e4b0896b3631a9a1 It takes two players and two sixteen-button controllers, and like everything that Takahashi has touched, it sounds totally charming.

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]]> carrier signal Edmund Chu Tue, 19 Mar 2013 04:22:40 +0000 https://solitonic.co/blog/2013/3/18/little-inferno-just-for-me 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:5147e794e4b0d1d31cb1d513 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.

1. Well—not exactly all.  ↩

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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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Sat, 16 Mar 2013 02:30:28 +0000 http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/15/4110532/dropbox-reportedly-paid-around-100-million-for-mailbox 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:5143d94fe4b0e8b32a7872f8 The app’s been out for a month, barely. Jesus Christ.

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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Fri, 15 Mar 2013 22:02:07 +0000 http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cleaning.html?m=1 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:51439c86e4b0e8b32a77fae5 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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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Wed, 13 Mar 2013 04:10:24 +0000 http://www.gameranx.com/features/id/13224/article/the-mystery-and-fraud-of-tropes-vs-men-in-videogames/ 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:513fdce0e4b040273ace18e5 How about that.

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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Wed, 13 Mar 2013 01:53:28 +0000 http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/dad-hacks-donkey-kong-for-his-daughter-princess-pauline-now-saves-mario/ 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:513df871e4b0fe58c65c6f8f Pauline swings a mean hammer.

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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Mon, 11 Mar 2013 07:54:17 +0000 https://solitonic.co/blog/2013/3/11/classic-misdirection 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:513d8db4e4b0abff73bebf6e 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.

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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]]> carrier signal Edmund Chu Sat, 09 Mar 2013 00:06:00 +0000 https://solitonic.co/blog/2013/3/8/kentucky-route-zero-act-one 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:5129c1a1e4b0fd698ec03910

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

I don’t know if I can describe the game in any especially specific way, so let’s just use developer Cardboard Computer’s elevator pitch:

Kentucky Route Zero is a magical realist adventure game about a secret highway in the caves beneath Kentucky, and the mysterious folks who travel it. Gameplay is inspired by point-and-click adventure games (like the classic Monkey Island or King’s Quest series, or more recently Telltale’s Walking Dead series), but focused on characterization, atmosphere and storytelling rather than clever puzzles or challenges of skill.

That’s about it, but it’s just about right. If anything, really, it kind of undersells itself. It might end up being difficult to talk about the game without waxing poetic and getting all purple and stupid, so as precaution, I’ll say this up front: if Act I is any indication of the remaining four, Kentucky Route Zero is great.

But then of course, caveat emptor and all: we haven’t seen the rest of the game yet—each act is to be released every few months, over the next year. With how much yt. loved the first part, it’s going to be a long wait. And everything might just fall apart with the next episode and ruin everyone’s hopes forever.

But this first part! This first part. There’s a ton to like, here, and a ton plot-wise/thematically that’s lurking just under the surface—one assumes it’s likely to emerge, fully formed, in some later episode. Protagonists Conway and Shannon hint at sad and troubled histories that feel only just scabbed over. The music’s this blend of calm Brian Eno-synthy stuff and ambient noise; it very occasionally dips into creepy territory (and once, when you least expect it, into bluegrass gospel), but most of the time it’s the kind of thing you’d expect to hear if you were gawking at the sky in wonderment. There’s the lovely, lonely line art of the overworld (just enough to recall the beautiful angular aesthetic of the main gameplay) where the player drives around between the game’s various scenes and vignettes. And then we have the big story hook, that question that no one asks but that everyone takes for granted: What the heck is the Zero?

To get any closer to the answer—at least until the rest of the game is out—the player actually has to go out and get all metatextual by playing the pseudo-demo, Limits and Demonstrations.

Limits isn’t a slice of any particular part of Act I or Kentucky Route Zero proper. Instead, it’s a short stroll—maybe fifteen minutes—through a museum and stars the three Greek chorus-like characters that appear (in a couple of unexpected ways) in Act I. But in addition to hinting at things to come, it’s a great distillation of what makes Kentucky Route Zero so good. In the game (as in the demo), the player travels between meticulously crafted scenes, each tinged with the supernatural. (The game’s self-described as magical realism, after all.) The sights are all foreign and yet nostalgic; gleaming but choked with grime.

But like all good magical realism, it remains grounded, in a stoic that-was-strange-but-I’ve-seen-stranger type of way. And like most good road trips, the oddities of the road—the Zero—are just a MacGuffin for exploring the peculiarities of the people along the way. Its themes lie squarely in the human condition. (Whatever the heck that means.[1]) It comes through more in the game proper—I mean, fewer limits, less demonstrating, more doing, obviously—but one does get the sense that the entire experience of playing the game reflects that of spying on fleeting, private moments while traveling between Point A and Point B. Starting a conversation with a stranger seems harmless enough, but pretty soon you’re getting sucked into something intimate and personal and tragic. And. Well. Even a little dangerous.

It’s definitely the case that Kentucky Route Zero has more in common with interactive novels and movies than traditional adventure games—there’s only one “puzzle”; it occurs at the very beginning, and it hardly counts as puzzling, really. The rest is exploration and writing. The game’s clearly reaching for literary heights, and it makes no bones about its goals or influences,[2] or how long the creators have spent thinking about them. Allusions abound; Homeric comparisons are particularly apt, I think.

There’s a ton to unpack in each scene—I mean it about the “meticulously crafted” thing. Of course in the intertextual kind of way; it’s a smart game. But just emotionally, viscerally, too. Not rarely did I get something a little funny in my throat—some vista, maybe (that television!), or a secret let slip in the midst of conversation.[3] It’s not all tragedy and heartbreaking beauty, either; I loved the quiet, easy traveler’s rapport between Shannon and Conway—particularly the casualness with which they searched for the Zero’s onramp, in a mine cart of all things, Conway resting quietly, Shannon relaxed in her seat. These feel like dense characters who know and feel much more than they let on. And yes, I know, I know—I keep banging on this lofty-but-grounded/supernatural-but-human drum, but seriously, with Act I, Cardboard Computer has done it so well.[4]

It’s some of the the rarest, highest praise that I can give when I say that I wish I could play a game for the first time again, but I can safely say that of Kentucky Route Zero’s opening act. (There’s an upshot to the episodic model here, at least—there’s four more to look forward to.) Act I is so odd, so beautiful, so thoughtfully realized; it’s a story made by game developers who possess a powerful control over their craft and have the confidence to use it in subtle and sparing ways.

I opened by saying that I didn’t know how to describe the game. Having written all this, I think I’ve failed to do it any justice. But something does comes to mind—the game happens speak for itself:

That’s about it, but it’s just about right.

Cardboard Computer’s Kentucky Route Zero is available direct from their website and from Steam.

1. Don’t call it new theatre, Charlie; call it real theatre. Call it our theatre!  ↩

2. Conveniently, a list of the latter is made available if the player is willing to do a little extended exploration. Names and mediums range, unsurprisingly, far and wide.  ↩

3. Yt. keeps thinking back to a certain moment in a certain coal mine. Could be that this’ll spoil something, here, but: “My parents sang for coal scrips” hit me right in the gut. What sort of desperation do you have to be in to trade that kind of beauty for something so small? Or: that diner. Or: That joy when that song kicks in. Or: Or: Or: Or:  ↩

4. Another example, and a thing I like: the members of the chorus are above the action, but rather than being a bunch of snarky assholes loitering in the peanut gallery, they do things like go to museums and play tabletop RPGs.  ↩

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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Thu, 07 Mar 2013 03:42:38 +0000 http://www.seattleweekly.com/2013-03-06/music/punk-rock-is-bullshit/full/ 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:51380cbae4b08ef26b55530a 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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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Wed, 06 Mar 2013 15:01:53 +0000 http://www.spyparty.com/ 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:51375a6ee4b0c7454f95266c 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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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Wed, 06 Mar 2013 05:06:43 +0000 http://www.salon.com/2013/03/01/dont_blame_the_victim_or_the_photographer/ 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:5136bcc0e4b06d40ae8951cf 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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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Wed, 06 Mar 2013 03:34:54 +0000 http://sgrblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/post-webcomics.html 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:5136b969e4b09e6afa7bad7b 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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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Fri, 01 Mar 2013 04:14:36 +0000 http://www.versu.com 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:51302963e4b0776ccd66643b 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.

1. 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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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Fri, 01 Mar 2013 02:53:05 +0000 http://creativegood.com/blog/the-google-glass-feature-no-one-is-talking-about/ 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:51301826e4b07c6e60bb8e7b 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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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Fri, 15 Feb 2013 21:08:04 +0000 http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/redthread/dreamfall-chapters-the-longest-journey 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:511ea3bfe4b0ca194da0ed18 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.

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

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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Wed, 13 Feb 2013 04:34:47 +0000 http://www.mailboxapp.com 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:511a6614e4b0735b6626d25e 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]

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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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Thu, 07 Feb 2013 15:36:41 +0000 http://nplusonemag.com/certainty-of-hopelessness-how-to-discharge-student-debt?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+nplusonemag_main+%28n%2B1+magazine%29 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:5113c991e4b064b9ab65a15e 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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]]> Edmund Chu Thu, 31 Jan 2013 03:06:47 +0000 https://solitonic.co/blog/2013/1/30/proteus 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:5109dd65e4b000ead7e007c4

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.

Proteus is a game of exploration, music, and ambient soundscapes. It is a total delight to explore, especially if you are feeling quiet and you have headphones at hand. And it makes me giddy in the same way that video games before the Internet made me giddy—"Did you know if you go here and you do this, then…"

To call it a game is maybe a little misleading, because there’s no overt objective and no conflict. But that’s really kind of what I like about it! At a time when I’m feeling like most video games are becoming more and more divergent from what I want to play, Proteus is totally uncompromising in its mystery and its total silence vis a vis thematic purpose. It's willing to treat its players like thoughtful, mature people[1] who are willing to wholly engage in some really basic acts: walking, looking, listening. Nearly everywhere else, these are taken for granted. In Proteus, that’s all there is. And they turn out to be joyful and weird.

It all sounds a little fruity, honestly, and maybe I’m gushing a bit.[2] Truthfully, there isn’t much beyond all that.

But then there was this: I sat on the beach at twilight and watched crabs play in the shallows, while storm clouds rolled in with the night. It was genuinely beautiful. How many other games have that?

1. See also: XCOM: Enemy Unknown, another choice 2012 title, which trusts players to not only make their own decisions, but to take responsibility for consequences both good and ill. The result: perfect measures of bitter defeat and hard-earned triumph.  ↩

2. One thing that I haven’t talked about: the music. This is because it is really, really hard to talk about. But here goes: it changes. It’s tactile. It’s kind of like someone whispering in your ear. You can feel it in your shoulders.  ↩

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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Wed, 30 Jan 2013 05:23:18 +0000 http://www.decodedc.com/home/2013/1/17/episode-6-the-future-was-now.html 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:5108ae50e4b04ea0ec1802f6 DecodeDC recently ran a retrospective on the SOPA protests. Supremely insightful, informative, and hopeful.

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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Tue, 29 Jan 2013 16:45:54 +0000 http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/01/28/cardboard-children-sherlock-holmes/ 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:5107fccde4b0c5b9da4607c8 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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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Mon, 28 Jan 2013 14:38:28 +0000 http://sexyvideogameland.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/no-more-objectification.html 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:51068d6fe4b0869f64180e78 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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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Sat, 26 Jan 2013 01:36:30 +0000 http://kentuckyroutezero.com 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:51033329e4b05eda2a57ccb7 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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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Sat, 26 Jan 2013 00:50:51 +0000 http://vine.co/v/b5210DT9UBz 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:51032876e4b06fd5cb8ef251 Never has a social network so quickly reached its pinnacle.[1]

1. cf.  ↩

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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Fri, 25 Jan 2013 18:11:17 +0000 http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2013/01/18/baby-got-back-and-glee/ 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:5102ca4ae4b091edd3f1c5ed I don’t even like Jonathan Coulton, but this is so shitty.

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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Fri, 25 Jan 2013 04:38:23 +0000 http://joshuablankenship.com/blog/2013/01/23/how-to-ensure-your-ideas-are-never-criticized 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:51020c0de4b01cb3fe312464 Advice.

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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Thu, 24 Jan 2013 03:23:54 +0000 https://solitonic.co/blog/2013/1/23/congratulations-you-are-now-a-kotaku-commenter 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:5100a955e4b0d7b3b6b416b1 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]

1. Man I mean I know the writers and comment moderators try, but Jesus.  ↩

2. 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.  ↩

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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Mon, 21 Jan 2013 01:54:00 +0000 http://www.gamasutra.com/view/pressreleases/184842/lsquoDead_Island_Zombie_Bait_Editionrsquo_Announced_ForDead_Island_Riptidetrade..php 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:50fb4142e4b0dc8c8e2cc00d Ugh.

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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Sun, 20 Jan 2013 18:32:00 +0000 http://www.penny-red.com/post/40595682748/on-feminism-transphobia-and-free-speech 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:50fb46d0e4b000014e78f1f2 Laurie Penny responds to a vile article in The Observer.

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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Sun, 20 Jan 2013 00:40:39 +0000 http://www.abolish.me/blog/semantic-notes 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:50fb3d0fe4b0499abb036382 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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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Tue, 15 Jan 2013 05:35:42 +0000 http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/print/2013/01/how-the-video-game-industry-already-lost-out-in-the-gun-control-debate/267052/ 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:50f42820e4b0d70ab600f2c9 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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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Tue, 25 Dec 2012 00:35:59 +0000 http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/04/23/120423fa_fact_lepore?currentPage=all&mobify=0 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:50d8f422e4b0c2f4975c8c56 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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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Thu, 20 Dec 2012 15:01:48 +0000 http://boingboing.net/2012/12/12/j-rabbit-happy-things-mu.html 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:50d32867e4b0a4fc69067912 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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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Tue, 11 Dec 2012 14:57:38 +0000 http://www.alessonislearned.com/index.php?comic=42 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:50c749ece4b012358d45e8eb For the first time in five years, there's a new A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible.

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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Sat, 24 Nov 2012 07:45:41 +0000 http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/11/23/gaming-made-me-fallout-2/ 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:50b07a95e4b01c11f0ecffd9 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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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Fri, 23 Nov 2012 19:43:26 +0000 http://theoatmeal.com/comics/making_things 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:50afd1f3e4b01f1114af2f86

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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Fri, 16 Nov 2012 21:48:17 +0000 http://www.marco.org/2012/11/16/twitter-being-a-dick-again 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:50a6b43ae4b0fddba225fc06 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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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Thu, 15 Nov 2012 15:03:06 +0000 http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/davidhellman/second-quest 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:50a50432e4b013b04b89e988 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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]]> carrier signal Edmund Chu Wed, 14 Nov 2012 04:56:33 +0000 https://solitonic.co/blog/2012/11/13/to-the-moon 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:50a3248ce4b0f822f2906cc9 View fullsize

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.

1. 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.  ↩

2. The epilogue of this game basically guarantees that a sequel is at least in the works.  ↩

3. Spoiler alert: Johnny has a wife with a fairly tragic story arc. It ends like all fairly tragic stories.  ↩

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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]]> amplifier Edmund Chu Mon, 05 Nov 2012 05:54:16 +0000 http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/34769112306/the-numbers 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:50975484e4b09e893828ab43

“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.”

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]]> carrier signal Edmund Chu Fri, 26 Oct 2012 23:17:00 +0000 https://solitonic.co/blog/2012/10/26/the-lord-of-the-rings-50th-anniversary-edition 4ff37dd8e4b03ec22b10eb93:4ff37ea9e4b00a627ba62447:508b19ebe4b08e76ed26bb5b 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.

1. 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.  ↩

2. Generally with mixed results, grade-wise.  ↩

3. 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.  ↩

4. WHICH IS A PIVOTAL MOMENT AND REPRESENTS ARGHGHAGSDHOIKLAFS DLJK ASDAA FSDI;OASDL ;  ↩

5. 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.  ↩

6. He said, having just admitted to reading The Silmarillion.  ↩

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