Blog Title

Hades 2

2025-12-16T00:00:00Z

*This is just my Steam review from this game lol. I wanted to write something more thoughtful and still might, but I feel like I don't want to let my Content languish on the Platforms anymore. *

It's fun. There's a lot of game in this game. We heard you like Hades so we put Hades in your Hades so you could, etc. Level design, enemy design, environment design—impeccable. The whole thing is a 9/10 at least.

But I don't know, man. It's pristine to the point that it almost feels somehow a little precious or something. (The whole thing is twee in a way that makes me feel nervously nostalgic for 2018 or whatever, when the arc of history seemed, in the face of everything, still stubbornly and slowly drifting wokeward, though this feeling diminished once the game's narrative began to drift into incoherence.)

As for this game, "Hades II: More Hades," I muddled my way through and then unlocked an insane weapon and just sort of won. Did I get better at it? I guess. The enemy design is incredibly satisfying to learn. But it's still a lot of, like, "Oh ok I guess I got bonkers boons this run time to not screw it up." I "100%ed" it which I've only ever done for one other game, the Boltgun typing game—and then I kept playing it, which is bizarre.

Has anyone commented on how the characters are sexy hott in this game? It's like they knew I was a person who occasionally finds other people attractive on some visceral level! They really thought of everything when they made this thing, didn't they? The phrase "fan service" popped into my head a lot. You literally take baths with everyone (unfortunately not all at once). To be fair, I find Mel's, uh, bathtime portrait movingly vulnerable in a way that punches way above its character-development weight.

It's honestly a lot. The whole thing is a lot, like so much, but it's also sort of not a lot, like not quite enough. The writing is excellent on the sentence-by-sentence level but the plot, as others have said, rides powerful witch vibes for a while then just kind of flops around for a while. I thought it was kind of silly how the first one is so committed to remedying the tragedies of ancient Greek myth—what a hilariously American project!—but this one opts for justifying their injustice (in at least a few cases) in a way that I found genuinely maddening.

I love the witchy witch stuff in here. I am a gay woman. I love the Crossroads and I like Mel, whose name I'm not typing out not because we're pals but because I don't want to look up "umlaut e" on the internet, more than Zagreus. I laughed out loud dozens of times at a few of the characters' dialogue. Skelly and Dora are both exceptionally funny characters. Every character is overflowing with personality. It's a genuine achievement.

But there's something conservative about the gestalt of this game, something willfully unadventurous, that makes me feel like the adulation for it—which is, on its merits, entirely deserved—comes at the expense of something more daring, or evinces something unhappily zero-sum about "modern games." This is not Supergiant's fault! They did a tremendous job making seemingly exactly the game they wanted to. There's so much love in this game. It is moving to experience. Thinking about how good it feels to play makes me a little emotional: like, that was so nice of them to make me feel this good in my hands and eyeballs.

The "lite" part of Hades has always kind of felt like when they make a "healthy" version of junk food, like high-protein organic Pop Tarts, except the original is, like, free-to-play numbers-go-up endless-checklist Cookie Clicker-type shit. To be clear, like 90% of my diet is that weird protein stuff, because I don't know how to live. But when you're eating it, you're unusually aware of what it's not. I'm trying to stop putting on podcasts or audiobooks when I play games and this game was good for being a "podcast game" that gave me enough to resist that impulse. I really enjoyed my time with this video game and will probably keep playing it, though I hope it makes me want to play more games that are nothing like it, instead of games that are lesser versions of it.

I will conclude with an ironic '90s game magazine-style breakdown of the game's components: GAMEPLAY: TEN OUT OF TEN! STORY: SIX OUT OF TEN....CHARACTERS: NINE OUT OF TEN! MUSIC: EIGHT POINT FIVE OUT OF TEN. GRAPHICS: FIVE OUT OF TEN—THEY'RE GOOD FOR WHAT THEY ARE BUT THEY'RE NO "AVATAR: FRONTIERS OF PANDORA." OVERALL: NO ONE KNOWS

School of Rock (2003)

2025-12-14T00:00:00Z

For several years in my early twenties, I played drums in a rock band. I loved playing drums. The performances themselves were exciting and cathartic. We were a tight, well-rehearsed act. I was personally close with most of the band. Despite being the least technically skilled of the three backing musicians, my parts were fast and showy, and if I'm going to show off, doing so from a concealed position at the back of a room is a pretty nice way to go.

That said, it was, on the whole, it was an intensely disappointing experience. The music was not very good. We were essentially the backing band for a solo project, charged with interpreting and performing irritatingly and uninterestingly counterintuitive music that the bandleader composed on, if not for, his computer. The bandleader, for his part, meant well, but he was a privileged, anxious person, and this frequently made him hard to work with. Among other things, the way he treated his backing band taught me some unsalutary lessons about what my work is or isn't worth, lessons I've struggled to unlearn in the years since.

It is worth noting here that, unless your band is exceptionally successful, touring in a rock band is hard. All you do is carry stuff around and exert yourself and drive, drive, drive, and then you summon the energy to adequately convivialize with a bunch of strangers on whose kindness you are actively depending to survive, and also you’re eating and sleeping like absolute shit. Our three-week tour might be the straight-up hardest I've ever worked in my life, including the years I lived on a farm. Despite that, you’re lucky at the end if you break even.

In recent history, the difficulty of touring has been mitigated through participation in the decentralized cultural apparatus of punk houses, DIY spaces, co-ops, and college venues, among other semi-institutions, sustaining independent music in North America. But between the advent of streaming, the broad capture of the internet by social media and advertising, the absurd cost of rent in major cities, crackdowns following the Ghost Ship fire, etc., this infrastructure has become generally hollowed-out and difficult to access—not that a “DIY ethic” really interested our bandleader, whose ambitions were fundamentally commercial.

The whole thing was weird and hard and lonely. I have fond memories of playing, and I don't really regret performing with that band, but I wish I hadn't contorted the rest of my life around it, and I wouldn't go back.

Maybe two years before I quit, I was at a gathering following a memorial service for my grandmother. Because my grandfather is a sociopath, the service had been fraught and deeply emotionally unhelpful; surreally, the gathering was being treated like a lunch party. So I was already solidly dissociated when a wealthy-looking older woman whom I couldn't recall having met before started talking to me. She asked me, in that particular way that real adults with real lives ask this question, what I did. I said I was a music teacher in Rhode Island and played music with a band. “Oh that's wonderful my son played guitar growing up now you say you've been on tour now how was that” and on and on: a familiar interaction. I was giving my semi-rehearsed spiel when, randomly, she cut me off and said, as if summarizing what I had been expressing, “Just living the dream.” This struck me as so divorced from how the experience I was explaining felt that I just stopped and stared at her for a few seconds. Still, she wasn't wrong.

It is worth stating near the outset that rock music is, as a rule, stupid. The tradition of recorded rock music has given us a rich archive of deep artistry and genuine beauty, one which probably taught me how to care about being alive. But it is, at root, a profoundly silly thing. It's so silly, in fact, that it can be hard to imagine why or how the “rock band” as a social form could possibly “matter,” especially now that widespread, powerful music production software has rendered the independent musician an isolated figure (sorry—an auteur), hunched over a macbook in their lonely bedroom, diligently sculpting visual representations of digital representations of sound.

But for a certain kind of young person at a certain point in history the idea of starting a rock band seemed a genuinely mystical one. For my part, it is hard to think of concepts outside of the familial as formative to my sense of the possibilities of sociality. Seen through the gauzy filter of envy and admiration, the rock band seemed to collect and synthesize so much that is good in life—friendship, discipline, transcendence, beauty, physicality, ritual, intensity, collective action—into an entity famously greater than the sum of its parts. Like popes or married women, the Ramones assumed new names. James Hendrix was a guitar player, but his band made him an experience. There are the Beatles, and then there is The Beatles. Consider the igonominy of the “solo career”: apart from the nuclear family (and maybe team sports), what other post-1980s USAmerican context has ever privileged a collective entity over an entrepreneurial individual?

As an adolescent, I read and reread Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life, a book which describes the sublimation of the hedonistic, vacuously celebritous mainstream rock music of the 1970s and '80s into a handsome and salutary register of hard work and earnest ethics and diet-anarchist political economy. The book winningly hagiographs the careers of some of the straight-up coolest bands ever: from the working-class modernist Minutemen to the high-cultured urbanite scuzzballs in Mission of Burma and Sonic Youth. I still owe much of my politics to the sweetheart puritanism of Fugazi. Playing in a band meant existing at the nexus of everything exciting: knowing about avant-garde art I'd never heard of, living in big cities I'd never been to, hating corporations but also actually doing something about it, hanging out with your buds all the time, either smoking a ton of weed (Dinosaur Jr., Butthole Surfers) or taking a Principled Stand against smoking any weed (Minor Threat), making insane noises come out of large amplifiers, saying mysterious things in interviews...who wouldn't want to be a part of whatever it was that allowed all this to happen?

As it turns out, I didn't. One night, after my actually-existing rock band had settled firmly into disappointment but years before I'd finally quit, I was in Brooklyn for a show. (The band was based out of NYC, but I drove down from Rhode Island because I couldn't afford NYC rent.) My girlfriend at the time, a lifelong Brooklynite, also lived in the city. We were hanging out at some crowded Crown Heights bar when she asked me, in general terms, how I felt about the band.

I babbled and dithered for a while until I suddenly realized: I am doing what I’d always wanted to do. I’m playing in a rock band in the city I’d always believed to be the epicenter of culture. At the time, the band’s two most promising industry connections hadn’t yet been shooed off the scene for being sex pests; “success” seemed, while still unlikely, possible. Wasn't this where I wanted to be?

But I knew better. By the late 2010s, the media apparatus surrounding “independent music” seemed designed specifically to forestall the possibility of a truly alternative cultural infrastructure. This was the era where pseuds like Holly Herndon and Brendon Stosuy were treated as leading representatives of independent musical culture and thinking, all the while securing their MoMA PS1 bags by laundering, respectively, theory-damaged private-college nihilism and brainless posi-vibes self-help grindset MLM crap into a self-serving pyramid scheme: “do it yourself” not as aspirational collective ethos but as an injunction from above. Figures like this, working in tandem with corporate institutions like Pitchfork and comic-book villains like Daniel Ek, successfully expropriated the cultural capital independent musicians had accrued through resisting regular capital, then took all the regular capital, too. The dreamy title promise of Our Band Could Be Your Life was probably always a fiction, but its loss still stung. “Independent music” was, by the time I was an “independent musician,” nothing more than a slightly more-educated, substantially less-lucrative wing of the culture industry, and the culture industry did what it always did: elect, like the Calvinist God, the winners, then tell you over and over that the winners they picked are the best, and you think they're the best now, too, don't you? You wish you were them, don't you? (Their band could be your life.)

And so, sitting there in that crowded bar, thinking about all of how much love I'd devoted to this stupid idiot art form, surrounded by people making ten times as much as I ever had working jobs with titles like “creative director” and “project manager”—there at this high-top we were sharing with strangers, to my shock and embarrassment I straight-up burst into tears. Because I realized, suddenly and forcefully, that I didn’t want any of this. I didn’t want to contribute to that psychospiritual alienation, that feeling that all the good stuff was happening somewhere else. I didn’t want to win, because I didn’t want it to be something one could win. It hadn’t felt good to be on the outside, but I didn't want to be on the inside.

I felt this way both because the inside was artless financialized garbage divorced from the true good and beautiful, yes, but also because the lesson of rock music, or at least punk music, is that you can make an inside wherever you are. What had been so activating about rock music to me were not merely its formal qualities, but the fact that it could, and did, happen where I was: in my bedroom and my weird friend Michael's basement, in the digital eight-track recorder I got as a combination Christmas-and-birthday gift, in the little room I got piano lessons in after school and the high school band room and the makeshift stage at the local YMCA, in my CD player and at the record store thirty minutes away and on my car stereo and through my iPod. Because of this, rock music, for me at least, was like most music for most of human history: something people made for themselves. Music lived in opera halls, yes, it also lived in drawing rooms and living rooms and churches. Good daughters learned piano so families could have music in their houses. Before the advent of recording technology, music was sung not merely by distant celebrities months or years prior, but by us, in the present tense. Recorded music is an echo of this, a ghost: a splendid one, to be sure, but a ghost nonetheless.

I don't think this died with recording, to be clear. Not only has the live show proven an enduring institution, but recorded music itself has found ingenious ways of incorporating this present-tense energy into the recording process both aesthetically and culturally. If a bunch of smartasses from Queens who could barely play their instruments can make immortal contributions to the canon of popular American song, why can't you? When a venue reneged at the last minute on their promise that a show would be all-ages, Fugazi moved the concert to a shut-down grocery store. Guided by Voices wrote some of the greatest pop songs in history and recorded them in a Dayton schoolteacher’s living room. The best Liz Phair record is still her demos. The glory of the rock band is the democratic glory of the popular arts. The first song I ever played on guitar was “Seven Nation Army”; the second was a song I wrote. My song, obviously, wasn't anything special. What was special is that I felt I had permission to write it.

The movie School of Rock was released in October of 2003, when I was ten years old. I have probably seen it five or six times since, never really of my own volition; it was a canonical last-day-before-break high school movie. The occasion of this review is seeing it at a monthly movie night in a friend of a friend's backyard.

I want to be very clear: this movie is, like rock music—especially the rock music its title points towards—stupid. The Sarah Silverman character is a comically Huge Fucking Bitch; one hopes, but can’t quite be sure, that the movie knows what it’s doing here. The canon of rock music Jack Black's character loves is both implausible (I cannot imagine someone, especially back in 2003, who knows as much about post-punk as his music history blackboard demonstrates unironically adoring AC/DC) and strangely well-observed, at least in part due to the hilarious fact that Jim O'Rourke worked on the movie. (This whole article is worth reading—I had no idea before reading it, for example, that the guy from Shudder to Think wrote the rival band’s battle-winning and utterly cornball ballad.) I don't really know what was going on with Richard Linklater’s direction, but all the performances are pitched just past the point of plausibility in a way that might not be “good,” but kind of rules.

That said! More of it than you would think has held up well. There's some really clever writing. (The double entendre at the parent-teacher conference remains an all-time punch line.) The montage in the middle, set to the perfectly weird late Ramones single “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg”, is the Platonic ideal of a training montage. I can very, very easily imagine being annoyed by Jack Black, but I think this is the movie he was made for; on its own terms, his performance strikes me as basically undeniable.

The thing that always jumps out at me when watching this film as an adult is something very important to its success, such as it is: it is oddly, genuinely sweet. The movie is filled with structural clunkers—the fat Black girl has an amazing voice, but she's shy about being “ugly”; the ultra-swishy gay boy puts sequins on everything; the east Asian pianist is a nerd dork with a stereotypical accent; several of the girls are assigned to be “groupies”—but, at least to my sensibility, these bombs are more-or-less defused by film’s surprising tenderness. The shy girl gets over it pretty quick to become the best backup singer. The gay-ass kid's final outfits are pitch-perfect Angus Young schoolboy pastiche. The pianist is led to the correct and excellent realization that every great rock music keyboardist is a massive fucking dork. Jack Black's protests that being a groupie is actually about a kind of unsexual and essential pastoral support are so committed that you almost believe him.

Watching it this time I realized, maybe not for the first time, something very obvious: it is 100% a children’s movie. For my part, when I saw it as a kid, it drove me completely insane. It is mildly embarrassing to relate how intensely I responded to it, even though I was literally ten. But it was unbelievably exciting. It was so fucking cool. I still remember how amped I was on the drive home. In my memory, which I think I believe, I ran upstairs as soon as we got back to our house, brought my $200 Fender Squire-and-amp combo I'd also gotten as a birthday-slash-Christmas gift (how much of my music “career” is owed to my parents’ guilt about my birthday’s unhappy proximity to Christmas, who can say) down to the living room and plugged it in and played some power chords and my parents, bless their hearts, were happy about it.

A lot of the stupider things about the movie become more sympathetic when you realize it’s rooted in a child’s idea of the adult world. Jack Black is a kid’s idea of a bummy loser. Sarah Silverman is a kid’s idea of a buzzkill grown-up (which also explains the hilarious detail that she works as the “assistant to the mayor.” For whom but children could the idea of “the mayor” signify adult dignity?) Mike White is a kid’s idea of a nebbishy sellout. The fifth graders, for their parts, are maybe the most plausible fifth graders ever committed to camera. As a friend and fellow teacher pointed out, even though Jack Black spends the whole film doing morally dubious, literally illegal things, from a pedagogical perspective he’s a fucking incredible teacher: he’s engaging and funny and honest and speaks to his students like equals and believes very very strongly in them, and they can tell. As an adult, it's extremely funny that he insists on being the frontman and singer of a band full of fifth-graders, but as a kid it made total sense: it would be weirder if he weren't in the band, and his weird naive egoism makes his climactic last-minute audible, when he decides they’re going to perform the guitarist’s song instead of his, that much more affecting, a climactic conferral of dignity.

One of the things I really love about “School of Rock” when considered as a children's movie is how unconcerned it is with all that Disney Channel movie crap about “being yourself.” Every fucking children’s book and movie when I was a kid told a very specific story about “being yourself”: one in which the protagonist was always exceptional, always, in some way, genuinely better than everyone else: a closeted superhero or unrecognized big-brain genius or Harry Potter or whatever. The problem was that society, for one reason or another, makes them repress how exceptional they are— at least until Act 3, when they stop being afraid of their amazing unique brilliance and save the world and everyone claps and cheers and loves them for it. As best as I can tell, the moral of this story is twofold: (a) that it takes being the best to deserve love, or at least to deserve having a story told about you, and (b) if you're the best but other people don't recognize that you're the best, it's because they're stupid idiots.

This story sucks not only because it links human worth to flukish and socially-legible “talent,” though it does, but because being exceptional is a bullshit goal. As a kid, I was exceptional for one or two “good” reasons and a bunch of bad ones. (This is just to say, in my case at least, that if I'd been born ten years later I would've been clocked as autistic by the time I was three; instead, I figured I was just an annoying and unwieldy weirdo— which, to be fair, I also was.) Authority figures melodramatically praised me for the one or two ways in which I was the good kind of exceptional and punished me for the rest, and, as best as I can tell neither treatment was particularly helpful.

It was all fucking horseshit. I knew this from the jump and have believed it ever since. In memory, at least, that it was all horseshit was my first political intuition— specifically, the feeling of sitting in my own reading group in kindergarten, feeling the envy and approbation of those who were just learning, as was developmentally appropriate, to read, and knowing in my bones that none of us chose any of this. I call this a political intuition because it necessarily invalidates the concept of meritocracy, of the hierarchy of human worth that grounds mainstream American politics. Like everyone else, I had randomly woken up for the first time ever a few years earlier, and now I spent my days getting driven somewhere, told to do stuff, and then driven home. The arbitrariness of everything was reinforced a few months later when I fell off the monkey bars and broke my femur: a formative whoopsie.

In any case, by middle school it was all a moot point. I got a better grade when I took seventh-grade English in fifth grade than when I took it again in seventh grade, and I was so annoying all the time that I set the school record for detentions. So I knew that being the secret ultimate chosen-one genius superhero was a stupid goal—both because the allotment of what counts for talent during any given slice of history is utterly unrelated to what in us makes us worthy of dignity, but I also knew it was horseshit because I was a big Fugazi fan by the time I was in fourth grade, and they'd taught me all about how shitty society was, and how individualist consumerism was stupid, and what rape culture was, and how the soul was a strange, wild thing, and, like, who the fuck wants to be a solitary magical genius in a world that contains a rhythm section like Joe Lally and Brendan Canty? You can’t go that hard by yourself.

Hopefully obviously, none of this is to say that it’s wrong to desire to live authentically and with integrity. I just think the exceptionalist story misses a couple of things. For one, I think you can only achieve that kind of integrity through, alongside, and with others—specifically, others you’re not trying to dominate or surpass. But also, I think the Disney Channel concept of “being yourself” erases the fact that you can change. In those kinds of stories, the skills that make the protagonists valuable exist already, perfect little gems of talent, and bringing them into the world is just a matter of screwing up the courage to take them out of your pocket and show others the thing you had all along. This is not what happens in School of Rock. The film’s students do tap into something like “authentic” existence, but that’s not, or not only, because being in a rock band lets them “be themselves.” Being in a rock band allows them to become something they weren’t before, something they couldn’t have been on their own. They change: they become cooler and more self-assured, less willing to put up with the arbitrary cruelty of authority, more discerning in their sensibilities, more attuned to the possibilities of a collective endeavor. And while “natural talent” plays a part in it—only one student is the lead guitarist—the movie depicts everyone in the class as genuinely essential to the band's success. Another beautiful thing the band as a social form models is the fact people doing different things, with different talents, can come together to make something more than they could on their own. School of Rock broadens that ethos to encompass everyone in the room. Rock music serves as a counterpoint to the idea that the only way you can escape dull conformist acquiescence is through some kind of isolated heroic Randian excellence. There’s another way: by making something beautiful with your friends.

The fantasy of the rock band, especially the independent rock band, is the fantasy of change, the fantasy of community, the fantasy of growing up and gaining basic control over your world, of creating things you care about with people you love. It’s a fantasy that links you to a heritage of rebellion: there’s a way of saying “fuck you” to the world that’s a kind of love for the world, and people have said it before, together, and you can say it, too. It’s big and dumb and truly transcendent and I don’t know if any part of it is still alive—I hope it is—but I’m glad I got to be there when it was, or at least right afterwards. The version of it I wanted ended in disappointment for me and for the world both, but the possibilities it revealed are still there, if diffusely, elsewhere; they still orient me. I genuinely cannot tell if the American children’s film School of Rock is what a professional movie-watcher would call a “good movie,” but it is a movie that makes broad and ridiculous gestures towards a broad and ridiculous thing that meant more to me than I can say, and ultimately it’s just kind of nice to know that it’s still out there, pointing.

Replacing my smart phone post

2025-12-12T00:00:00Z

For “fun” I am going to catalog the stupid technology I use right now or whatever. Okay:

phone

I tried switching to a flip phone a couple of years ago, but I just don’t think the technology is there, really. Or at least it’s not there for me. I became even harder to reach, which is a huge problem for me personally, as I am already very bad and weird about communication with people I love who do not live in the same region as I do. Additionally, there are very few, if any, gadgets I have found less pleasurable to try to do stuff with than the flip phone. The interface is breathtakingly irritating. The feeling of being literally just unable to scroll down to a numerical code you need to log in to something is uniquely maddening.

So I started thinking about ways I could keep my smartphone without using it as much. I’d fucked around with like “minimalist themes” or keeping it in greyscale or whatever for a while, but none of these things ameliorated the central fact that I experienced it as essentially an eldritch portal to Hell that made everything I like and am interested in dissolve into a kind of mental grey goo sloppily colonizing my pathetically unshielded mind.

After quite a while of noodling around, this is basically the “workflow” (ugh) I came up with. For context, I still have my Samsung Galaxy; it’s plugged in by my bathroom sink and I look at it maybe once a day. I’ve organized it by function:

Talking on the phone while I’m out of the house. I purchased a $30 TCL flip phone preloaded with 1000 minutes or something from what is apparently the cheapest source for such things, the Home Shopping Network website. Unfortunately I fucked this all up some by forwarding texts to it using Tasker until I ran out of texts, and I can’t buy more. Still, it’s very straightforward to forward calls to another phone, at least with Verizon. A few more spam calls slip through than I’d like but that’s okay. Unfortunately I can’t forward calls backwards through my old number, meaning that when I call people from the flip phone, it shows up as a different number, and I can’t text them to warn that I’m about to call from a different number—this is all a genuine problem. But telling the people I’m likely to call about my new number gets me part of the way there.

Talking on the phone when I’m at my house. This is one of my favorite things about this whole setup. I got a landline-style cordless phone from AT&T and connected it via Bluetooth to my cell phone. When I receive calls now, the “home phone” rings like a landline, and I talk on the phone like I’m on a landline. The main complaint I have about this is that the phone is oddly quiet, and it would be nice to be able to connect a headset to the phone receiver so I could putter around while talking. But it’s also kind of nice not to be able to multitask. (More on that later.)

Texting. I’ve tried a bunch of different software for this but the only really reliable way I’ve found to forward and send texts even when I’m out of the house is Google Messages. (The Windows Link to Phone feature worked very well, too, but I use Linux for all my day-to-day computer stuff now, so it’s a moot point.) KDE Connect works well enough when I’m on a local network, and with Tailscale all my stuff functions like it’s connected to the local network, so that could potentially work. But it’s the tiniest bit spottier, the interface is clunkier—and, most fatally, it only works with SMS. I think people have been able to work MMS support in there, too, but I’d really like to be using at least RCS for texting where possible, if not Signal eventually, or whatever. Privacy is not my main concern with this whole setup but I think probably SMS as a protocol sucks so much that it really is basic best practices to steer clear where possible. I’m tentatively optimistic about this new software “fwd” that replaces Pushbullet, which I used before it became abandonware.

Likewise, I use the web client for Messenger and the Whatsapp client ZapZap for those chats. I think ZapZap is basically just a wrapper around a PWA but it works very smoothly.

Email. Nothing interesting here, except that I don’t check it on my phone. I do use Thunderbird, but I find its lack of cross-computer sync and a few other little things a bit frustrating. I’d like to set up a self-hosted email client at some point here so I could get it all kind of standardized and simple but I haven’t gotten around to figuring that all out yet.

A couple of general setup notes

Hardware note. The most important single piece of hardware I’ve found for replacing my smartphone in general has been the Boox Palma ereader. It’s (a) phone-sized, (b) runs Android, (c) lacks cell service, and (d) has an e-ink screen. It’s the e-ink screen that’s the most important thing here: I can look something up on the internet, but the screen provides just enough friction that I can resist getting sucked down a rabbit hole; if my smartphone as a device sort of pulls me towards a kind of evil flow void, this thing sort of broadly nudges me towards less self-obliterating functions. It’s still a little too online, maybe, and Android is shitty and only going to get shittier. But for now it’s the linchpin of the whole thing for me.

Tailscale. This the other important contextual note: the mindbendingly simple and robust service Tailscale extends my local network to wherever I’m using the internet. You just download the Tailscale application and log into a web interface and then you’re securely connected to all your other machines via VPN, which constantly allows me, an idiot, to do things that basically feel like magic tricks. It also means I don’t have to open anything on my home network up to the internet, which is good because that seems scary.

Home server. Long story short I use the laptop I used to take around with me as a server. It’s got normal old Ubuntu Desktop on it and it’s plugged into a 7 TB hard drive. It doesn’t have enough RAM for daily use, really, and also it’s ugly and I don’t like it, and when my backpack broke I dropped it and it’s dented. I use an ancient ThinkPad T450 with ElementaryOS on it when I leave the house now. When my loans come through next year I will get a slightly less ancient ThinkPad hopefully.

Back to other stuff

Music. I’ve been looking for a way to get off streaming basically since a few months after I first got Spotify back in 2013, and nothing has really stuck until now. I tried a couple of dedicated mp3 players, and would love to go back to one eventually for various reasons, but the “workflow” I have set up with the Boox Palma is undeniably extremely chill and convenient. Here’s how I download and listen to music right now:

(1) Use the self-hosted Soulseek client slskd to log on from any web browser, look up the music I want to listen to, and download it to my server.[1]

(2) I use SSH to log into my home server (through Tailscale), then run a single beets command to organize the files and import them into my library folder.

(3) Syncthing automatically syncs the music with my ereader.

I was experimenting with self-hosted streaming clients but I’ve been using Poweramp for Android music listening for years now and I am very attached to it; it might be my favorite mobile application of all time.

What I like about this setup is it provides just enough friction for me not to get bogged down in the Every Song Ever In History of streaming[2], but also is relatively convenient if I’m at a computer. As with so much of this, I think it’s about (1) calibrating the balance of friction and (2) limiting the extent to which I can digress from a given task. Also, using the command line still makes me feel very cool and elite, so it’s fun to use in a coffee shop or whatever.

Podcasts and audiobooks. I have a similar, though unhappily clunkier, operation with audiobooks involving torrenting and a seedbox and a differently configured version of beetsI run in its own Docker container, which reminds me that I will also make a server-specific post about what a Docker container is on the off-chance I haven’t already bored you to the point of weeping. Both audiobooks and podcasts are routed through the excellent self-hosted Audiobookshelf application. (The Android app has worked well for me, too.) I’m trying to reduce the quantity of time I spend listening to people talking at me in my ears all day so I haven’t gotten as much play out of this as I might’ve a few months ago, but it’s nice to have it all in one place, and it’s allowed me to cancel my Pocketcasts subscription (which is a nice solution for Android users not looking to self-host but interested in keeping podcasts synced across various devices).

“News.” FreshRSS has been great. I was trying to route it through various clients using APIs but honestly the web interface is just fine. Finding a good read-it-later client took a while for some reason but Readeck turned out to be the best bet for me; I dump articles I want to spend more time on into there and check them out when I feel like it, and then I can look them up easily when I’m working on something like this.

Ebooks. The best Android ebook client I’ve found is Moon+ Reader Pro; it interfaces directly with CalibreWeb, whose upload feature is awesome. (I would use a website like Anna’s Archive to pirate ebooks if that were something I did, which it isn’t.)

Photos. This one bummed me out but I dug out an old digital camera from my parents’ house. It’s too big to be truly convenient but it’s still kind of cool. I was never a big picture-taker though so who cares.

Notes. I use Obsidian for writing at this point and the notes apps on Android are great and work just fine on my Palma. I shell out for their sync feature and it’s about as frictionless as Google Drive.

Navigation. I got a good old-fashioned Garmin. Not having traffic info is tricky, though I think I can get that configured if I get another thingy or something. But honestly what it lacks in dexterity it makes up for with its UI, which I find much more handsome and usable than the Google Maps UI. I haven’t had to navigate a strange place on foot recently and I don’t know if I’d want to or be able to do that with the Garmin but if I move to a city where I can actually fucking walk anywhere at all I’ll have to think about this some.

Stuff I can’t do

Ride-share apps. I’ve used a Lyft once since being in Raleigh, when my car broke down; I got a friend to call me the ride and Venmoed them when I got home. If I travel I just bring my smartphone so no big deal.

Venmo. This kind of thing can almost always wait a few hours until I’m home.

Ordering delivery. This shit is so fucking expensive who cares.

Parking. This one is annoying. The credit-card machines usually take a lot longer. I got a privately-administered (?!) $35 ticket in this stupid bourgeois shopping plaza the other day because I couldn’t scan the mandatory QR code and the ticket says they’ll send it to a debt collector. To which I say: try me, motherfucker!!!! That coffee shop sucks anyway, it’s all like grindset weirdos and conservative women’s Bible studies and shit.

Social media. Lmaooooooo. I did start a Mastodon profile recently because I thought it would be funny if the “socials” I linked in my bio were like, Last.fm, Mastodon, and my Steam account. Unfortunately it’s pretty much a straight-up ghost town, and also it’s still fucking social media, which I hate.

Calendars. I could figure this out but I just keep a physical calendar so whatever.

QR code menus. I’m never at a restaurant like this—well, pretty much ever these days, but certainly not without other people who certainly have their own phones.

AAA app. This kinda fucked me recently but when I came back to my broken-down car with my smartphone with the app on it the app still didn’t fucking work so I just had to call anyway.

Checking my bank account. I’m independently wealthy so this is always full of tens of thousands if not hundeds of thousands of dollars so it’s not a concern for me.

I of course already own every album I’m trying to download, but for some strange reason I can’t rip them directly to my computer, so I have to download them again. This is true, of course, of every media file I am discussing in this post, and also ever.↩︎
Moreover, streaming, at least as it’s currently instantiated, is fucking horrible. I really think it’s so fucking bad. Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine on Spotify is the definitive text on why Spotify is so awful. But besides that, I think the evidence as to whether music piracy hurt independent musicians specifically is ambiguous. Obviously major label profits declined, but major labels were price-gouging profiteering motherfuckers that deserved and continue to deserve absolutely no quarter. The DMCA sucked, the RIAA sucked, it all fucking sucked. This is all obviously inflected by my personal experience both as a lifelong music fan who owes many of the great aesthetic journeys of my life to piracy, and also as a touring musician during the time I felt like Spotify really started shredding everything. And now that we’re entering AI slopworld background-music nightmare fucking bullshit shit world I just hate it and it fucking sucks. This also ties into something else I think about a lot, which is the extent to which the artists I know are putting faith in copyright law to save us from our piece of shit idiot fascist art-hating human-hating AI overlords. As is hopefully obvious I think generative AI art is fucking bullshit but I also think that copyright law has broadly been a means of allowing forces like major labels and major publishers to extract surplus value from artists and limit creativity from the exact same capital-brained anti-human nightmare position as the AI losers. If you had any skepticism about this, consider the Disney/OpenAI deal announced, like, yesterday or whatever. These fuckers are all the same: they hate art, hate culture, and hate you.↩︎

Thoughts on Computer (1)

2025-12-11T00:00:00Z

At some point in 2024, I realized that if my primary hobby was going to continue to be video games—that is to say, an activity exclusively conducted on screens and dubiously intertwined with the attention economy—I was going to need more control over the way I interact with screens that aren't game-related.

I think the touchscreen is profoundly overrated as an interface technology. If I am going to have to press a button to do something, I want the button (a) do what I think it will do and (b) to be where I think it will be. I want to perceive on a level as nearly intuitive as possible the relationship between a given input and what that input did. Touchscreens, especially smartphone touchscreens, are not great at performing these functions.

Obviously, no interaction I have with anything running on a CPU will be as immediate as pedaling a bicycle or pulling a lever. And the little vibration that phones do when, for example, you touch a button on the keyboard gets impressively close. But as anyone who has attempted to change the temperature in a car built in the last decade will tell you, there is a difference between turning a physical A/C knob and pawing at a capacitive touchscreen until a representation of an A/C knob pops up.

The object impermanence intrinsic to the touchscreen serves a purpose in terms of how many useful and semiuseful functions can be crammed in there. But the feeling of going to press a button that has vanished—or, perhaps more to later points I will make, the feeling of pressing a button that has suddenly popped up under your thumb—is not something we would tolerate under other circumstances. Compare the way we accept this disruption to the way we speak about the proprioceptive disorientation which follows from wrongly assuming a step is underfoot. Accidentally triggering the AI chatbot on a random retail website is like expecting a step that isn’t there, except we’re reaching for doorknobs that are turning into ATMs.

I’m overstating my case a bit for effect. But I do believe that the touchscreen is a useful stand-in here for the smartphone in general: neither has earned their hegemony on their merits, let alone democratically. And if, like me, you are someone prone to feeling disoriented basically all of the time, these mildly destabilizing interactions really add up, though I’m sure they’re annoying if you’re normal, too.

Here is a partial list of things I've regularly used my smartphone for: textual, verbal, and video-based communication; watching videos; reading books and news; listening to music, audiobooks, and lectures; engaging with academic material; recording music and voice notes; writing; checking the time; consulting and editing daily, weekly, monthly, and annual calendars; navigating physical space while driving and walking; consulting traffic reports; figuring out bus and train schedules; riding with car services; storing and using transportation and event tickets; registering for parking; finding urgent information; finding trivial information; remembering things; dealing with work and school logistics; ordering consumer goods; communicating with doctors and pharmacists; paying for things; ordering delivery; reading a restaurant menu inside of the restaurant; interfacing with my bank account.

Saying “I use my phone for a lot of stuff” is obvious to the point of uselessness, maybe. But it’s remarkable just how many things you can squeeze into a list like this, especially when you think about how you would perform these tasks without a smartphone.

To be clear, I do believe making one tool that can accomplish all of these tasks is an astonishing engineering achievement. It’s “convenient.” But catheterizing myself for a long drive would be “convenient,” too. When I pick up my phone to put on some music, then read a couple emails, remember an app I installed a while ago and meant to uninstall, uninstall it, read a text, then put the phone down, it’s like: killing two birds with one stone is “convenient,” but it’s disappointing when you went out just to birdwatch. When each of the tasks I need to perform on my phone requires passing through a fog-wall of distracting notifications, the frustration adds up.

At times, I struggle to feel a sense of agency over my own life. Some of this is philosophical or whatever, sure. But “the problem of free will” is not quite coterminous with the feeling that your life is, in some meaningful sense, out of your control. For me, this feeling was in large part circumstantial; an extended period of access to both prescription amphetamines and GLP-1 inhibitors has fully confirmed my intuition that “willpower” is an incoherent concept and that the people most likely to deploy it against you are literally cheating at being alive. In any case, I have begun, over the last couple of years, to feel a modicum of control over the circumstances and activities of my life. I’m still scared and confused most of the time, and I still don’t do a quarter of what I’d like to, but it’s pretty nice.

Because “control” can also mean some pretty nasty things, I have thought a lot about what I mean by it, or what it is I want that I call “control.” I think by “control” I mean roughly “the capacity to align my circumstances and actions with my values and desires.” I feel “out of control” whenever I am sideswiped by obligations I’d forgotten about, whenever I can’t direct my attention more-or-less where I’d like it to go, whenever I can’t sleep or eat well because I don’t like my living situation.

What this means is that the feeling of control can emerge from small, practical interventions. Here’s an example: I realized one day that I never worked at my desk. I told myself to work at my desk more, but that didn’t work, so I tried to figure out why I didn’t like working at my desk. Well, my chair sucks; let me put a little pillow under my back or whatever. Okay, that’s better, but I still don’t use it; why not? I don’t like how many cables are everywhere. I don’t like how Windows is laid out. My keyboard hurts my hand. The desk needs a lamp. No one of these fixes solved the problem on its own, but a few weeks of chipping away at them and suddenly I found myself working at my desk a lot more. I am sitting at it right now! This all was, in its way, a small, practical intervention in the direction of control. While tricky to get right, the only real constraint on this process when it comes to something like my desk are my resources.

Unfortunately, we are legally and practically forbidden from performing these kinds of interventions on our smartphones. This is not a technical limitation: we could be allowed to do this sort of thing. As Cory Doctorow emphasizes in Enshittification, every computer that exists can technically do everything that any other computer can do. Some might not have the hardware to do it at a reasonable speed, but they can, on principle, do it. What this means is that, if you can't do something with one piece of hardware that you can on a comparable piece of hardware, it is the result of human decisions.

For years, I have wanted to delete all web browsers and app stores from my phone. While I’d probably have to “sideload” (or install from a source outside of the app store) an app here or there, and I might have to borrow someone’s phone at some point to look something up, I wanted the temptations gone. But iOS and Android are configured to make this impossible.

The reasons for this are nefarious and obvious—they don’t want you to stop looking at your phone. (Android, at least, refers to apps such as these as “system apps” to give the vague impression that your phone will break without them, but of course it wouldn’t.) But it’s strange. Don’t I own this thing? Isn’t it mine to do what I want with? People might get sad if they accidentally delete the app store, sure, but if you turn on the developer tools you can fuck your shit up in a hundred different ways already; just lock the option back there.

As a “concession,” many phones now come with a widget that monitors how much you use different applications. The two functions of this seem to me to be (a) tricking you into thinking that the answer to an intrusive and inhumane economy built on constant surveillance is more surveillance and (b) making you feel guilty about how much time you’re spending on addictive software—including software they refuse to let you remove. On my Samsung Galaxy Whatever they call this surveillance app something like “Digital Wellbeing.” This makes me angry and upset, because it’s our lives they’re fucking with.

Consumption, as a rule, is not a means of exerting political agency. There are exceptions—yachts, Nazi black metal albums—but using Proton instead of Gmail isn't going to “do” anything, really.

Still, I think it is a useful personal exercise to exert agency where you feel agency is possible. I also think that the line between organized boycott and an individualist politics of consumption is, in a very few cases, thinner than you might believe. Veganism is a good example; ad blockers are another.

I am pessimistic about the prospects of boycotts like these given the scale. For example, the fares withheld by Black bus riders in Montgomery probably constituted a slightly larger percentage of the bus operators’ income than the money Microsoft lost from the BDS boycott of Xbox. But it’s good to participate in things like this, I think, because it makes participating in things down the line easier. And it's not like Xbox is doing particularly well right now, so hey. I’m not some fucking politics expert!

Likewise, extricating yourself from the clutches of Big Data is basically impossible. It's nice and good to toggle your Google settings in order to opt out of algorithmic recommendations, but those options strike me as akin to security theater. These companies lie to us, and the governmental bodies charged with forcing them to tell the truth not only fail to execute this function, but also lie to us. Tracking technology is sophisticated to the point of absurdity: even if you block every tracker and click no on every cookies pop-up, data brokers can figure out what you're up to online through your “browser fingerprint,” which is extremely hard to obscure, especially if you're doing things like installing ad-blocking extensions. If you are a cool elite freak like me running the a fork of Firefox called “Zen Browser” on Ubuntu with a bunch of weird extensions, well.

That said, I do think it's worth remembering that it's not just you versus some abstractly deific panopticon-wielding megacorp. Individual decisions about individual technologies can wind up important. “Tea,” a popular app that cynically captures and commodifies women's “whisper networks,” has experienced not one but two breaches revealing extremely sensitive information to potentially hostile actors. Perhaps even more dystopianly, personal materials (mostly publically available photos of real women) used to prompt an "erotic AI chatbot" were being hosted in an unprotected cloud bucket.

While the chatbot victims couldn't have done anything to avoid that (and the victims of the Tea leaks certainly aren't to blame, either), I think these underscore the specificity of individual privacy concerns. I don't think it's particularly likely that the NSA has much use for my SMS metadata right now—they're drowning in data anyway[1]; and while I don't at all like the idea of Gemini training on the content of my Google Docs, in the context of the entire corpus of human writing they're probably not wringing a lot of profit out of my short stories.[2]

It's good that using the computer is easier than it was back in the day. I need it to be relatively easy to use, because I'm not smart enough to figure out all of how a computer works. I doubt I will ever have the discipline, interest, or time to Learn to Code.

Since high school I’ve done shit like “put Linux on my laptop and then never use it.” But during the heady stimulus-check days of the pandemic, I had, suddenly and randomly, both the capital and interest to do shit like buy a Nintendo 3DS and jailbreak it. I didn’t really learn anything from doing this; I just followed tutorials. But after a few years of just following tutorials, I realized, embarrassingly recently, that I could absolutely learn something about how the computer works. I am still in the very early stages of doing this, but it was a very cool realization to have.

Like society writ large, computers are so complicated that nobody can master everything they are and do. In the same way that I’d love to be a true-blue expert on stuff like trees, sewage treatment, klezmer music, what the fuck a “comptroller” does, etc., I’d love to be able to program in COBOL, troubleshoot enterprise network problems, DDOS government websites with a botnet constructed out of unprotected smart thermostats (jokes!), etc. This is not going to happen.

However, I can still learn a little bit about how stuff works. I can get better at troubleshooting and take on slightly more ambitious projects. I can learn Markdown and a little HTML and some basic best practices for security and some command-line stuff. I’m not going to contribute to the body of technical knowledge in the world, but I can gain some marginally practical skills in a way that will make my life, if not better, a little more interesting. For someone who’s long conceived of myself as basically untechnical, this is a nice idea!

And, in the same way that participating in a consumer boycott and attempting to reduce the amount of information marketers have about me and realizing that I don’t have to like the design of smartphones can perhaps best be conceived as a type of “practice” for more serious and important things, I think that learning a bit here and there about the stuff I like and use is good practice. I realized long ago that I would never be a political organizer, but I only recently realized that openness to being organized is its own (admittedly lesser) skill, and I want to be available to help out how and where I can. I don’t know if this adds up or makes sense but at least it’s kind of fun or whatever.

As Gary Smith puts it in the Journal of Information Technology, “While data mining sometimes discovers useful relationships, the data deluge has caused the number of possible patterns that can be discovered relative to the number that are genuinely useful to grow exponentially—which makes it increasingly likely that what data mining unearths is likely to be fool’s gold.” This was written in 2020—which is to say, before the modern explosion in LLM data-processing capacity—so I'm not 100% sure this point stands with its original force, but based on some of the government's recent public-facing military implementations of AI, and they're of course already doing horrific things wiht AI, but it does seem like the the ultra-panopticon hyperefficient Minority Report big-brain fascism machine needs at least a bit more time to cook. ↩︎

But, like, here's a relatively mundane example from the other day: I've been trying to figure out a way of organizing the reading I do on the computer and my ereader. There are lots of notes apps, ebook readers, etc., and I'm trying to self-host stuff like this, but the most unified and convenient package seems to be this expensive and goofy application "Readwise." It has basically everything in one place. Seems nice! But upon looking into it, here is a representative statement from them on privacy:

Service providers. We may share your personal information with third party companies and individuals that provide services on our behalf or help us operate our Services (such as customer support, content moderation, hosting, analytics, email delivery, marketing, identity verification, fraud detection, payment processing, and database management).

Ok, but:

Does Reader support end-to-end encryption?

No. Reader is consumer software optimizing for user experience over enterprise compliance. If you're dealing in matters of national security requiring NSA-level encryption, you should definitely not save anything containing your state secrets to Reader (or any cloud-based software, for that matter). That said, you should generally feel comfortable that your private content will be kept private. For example, if you upload a PDF to Reader, no one will ever see that PDF but you.

I find this so stupid and condescending that I have deleted and rewritten this sentence multiple times in order to attempt to convey how stupid and condescending it is. "Oh, you don't want us to sell everything we know about everything you've read to anyone we want to? Are you in the fucking NSA? Shouldn't you know better if you're in the NSA, dipshit? Generally speaking just don't worry about it and we promise we won't look."

Here is one of my selfish reasons for not wanting the Amazon-Goodreads-Readwise industrial complex to see all my shit: barring the realization of the most maximalist AI bubble-popping scenarios, we are staring down a truly grotesque era of personally-tailored genAI advertisements. These are going to be unbelievably unpleasant, and I am going to hate them. Not that I'm not morbidly curious about the monstrosities Readwise would help advertisers generate for a 33-year-old trans woman whose electronic reading exclusively comprises RSS feeds, Warhammer 40k novels, and books about how the internet is bad—but generally speaking, the more these freaks miss the mark, the better. ↩︎

Outtakes from the WoW letter

2025-11-29T00:00:00Z

—a white kid whose name was, hilariously, identical to that of a very very famous Black actor; I won’t tell you what it was, but imagine a pasty, freckly, very muscular 5’8” seventh-grade starting fullback named, like, Chris Rock or something—
Mechanics in the Age of Artistic Reproduction
Video games, for the most part, document adventures.
As frightening as it is, one must move on. This is often hard to do.
A year or so later, I entered middle school. In baseball terms, I’d call this a forced error.
that wanting something is worthy of thinking through, even if we ultimately hope to slip free of our desire.
To play an MMO is
Mass media provides the illusion of perfect reproducibility.
The first novel I tried to write in college centered on a fictional massively multiplayer video game; I spent hours and hours laboring over several scenes outside a fictional stand-in for the video game store I hung out at sometimes.
Art, frequently, imitates life, but since art is inside of life, art is also a part of life. One part of life is imitating another. What this means is that the existence of art, or at least art that's mimetic in some way, is predicated on life being internally divided: not integral. [ed. - I wrote this high on an edible and really felt like I’d figured out the entire thing. Was this an accurate judgement? Well, dear reader,]
Life doesn’t need to be perfectly integral—though I think the world can do better than this—
Briefly, for context: the process of habit formation is often divided into three parts. First, there’s a trigger; second, the trigger motivates a behavior; third, the behavior is rewarded. All three parts are essential. All of this is neither here nor there, in a way. This just the way things work. It’s value-neutral.
Freud was deeply mystified by the human animal’s compulsion to repeat. If, as the saying goes, a functional definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, it might not be a stretch to say that human beings are fundamentally insane.
More generally, I do not know how to metabolize ephemerality. I do not find the art of losing easy to master.
The problem is not that it is a Warcraft game; the problem is that it is, as it purports to be, a world.
My sort-of friend
weird older guy who worked there sold kids cigarettes

About this site

2025-11-28T00:00:00Z

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The Tower of Druaga

2025-08-18T00:00:00Z

Hello! I have made many declarations on this website in this part of the blog post before and followed up on very few of them, so who knows what’s going to happen. Life is strange, and full of surprises. But my current thinking is that I am going to attempt to write short and less-ambitious posts about individual games I am playing, and also to write them more frequently. Okay see you soon!

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*The Tower of Druaga *has a reputation: famously opaque, obscure in the old, brutal way (not the subtle modern way, where an elegant trail of breadcrumbs leads to aesthetically precise secrets). The game was always described as linked intrinsically to the social dimension of Japanese arcade culture, the kind of collaboration only possible in a public setting. I’d heard of it, but as something that made a cameo in Jeremy Parish's videos, not like a game it was worth actually playing.

But I came across this list of game recommendations from the developer Sylvie the other day, upon which *Druaga *conspicuously appears…and curiosity got the better of me. There are a few versions, but the one I settled on was the Turbografx game, recently given a fan translation by Garrett Greenwalt.

The Tower of Druaga is simply and elegantly structured. You control Gil (short, wonderfully, for “Gilgamesh”). You are trying to get to the top floor to rescue your girlfriend (I think), Ki, who has been captured by the demon Druaga. Each floor is a level, each level is a maze, and each maze contains a secret or two, some monsters, a door to the next floor, and a key for the door. I forgot to take screenshots myself and the only ones I can find online are very small. Sorry! (source: RetroAchievements) The twist is that if you just get the key and open the door, at some point you will get stuck and become unable to progress. This is because, while most of these secrets are technically optional, a small handful are required to progress past certain chokepoints. More than anything else, the game is about finding these secrets.

What this means is that *Druaga *is actually something of a puzzle game. What’s tricky is the feeling that the terms of the puzzles go largely undefined. Sometimes all you have to do is kill the monsters, but more often the clues are esoteric: step on these mysterious circles on the floor in a particular order; hit the unbreakable external wall with your weapon; use a spell to turn the lights off for five seconds. This is where the social dimension of the game came in: allegedly, players of the original Japanese arcade version would leave a notebook tied to the arcade machine, filled with the handful of clues they'd been able to puzzle out.

It strikes me that Druaga's transition to home consoles probably came as something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, players now had the time to experiment: it's hard to walk around a level bonking every wall or whatever when game-overs cost money. On the other hand, stripping the game from its social context (especially before the internet, I imagine) must have made collaboration harder.

Enter the Turbografx version. There are a few tweaks this version makes, but the most essential one—the one that seems to me to transform the game entirely—is the addition of a hint at the beginning of each level. It's such a simple change, really: the kidnapped princess is given a single line of dialogue before each level begins. Screens like this teach you valuable lessons, like the lesson that The power of Druaga protects the outer walls from Pickax. (source: Giant Bomb) Especially on the easier difficulties offered by the Turbografx edition, this change turns Druaga from being a hopelessly cryptic cypher to an energetic little puzzle game, a sequence of connected riddles. There's something really satisfying about how clear and discrete each level feels. The combat is enough to keep you on your toes, and the mazes themselves, while never approaching genuine difficulty, are both elegantly straightforward and just convoluted enough to add flavor to navigation.

It took a while for me to understand the game's idiosyncratic (and definitely older-school) terms. It was only after looking up what I was supposed to do a few times that I even realized I was actually getting hints—like, directly applicable hints. But with this in mind, the language of the game, while still occasionally frustratingly obtuse, clarifies. You start to realize, for example, that the weird circles on the floor of every level occasionally (though importantly not always) serve a mechanical function: you can sometimes unlock a secret by stepping on them in the right order, pausing on them for a set time, standing on them and swinging your sword. The specific attacks of enemies become relevant: one level's secret might require that you equip a fire-resist shield and resist five fire attacks, for example. Every aspect of the simple environment—the torches on the walls, the placement of the doorway—starts to glow with potential mechanical relevance.

It's a wonderful effect, one that winds up feeling surprisingly fresh, even contemporary, an expression of a recognizable but happily and imaginatively off-kilter puzzle game setup. (Another feature which nicely rhymes with modern indies was the length: it took me about four-and-a-half hours to beat on the easy mode, which gives unlimited lives.) Despite its substantial influence, *Druaga *wound up feeling to me like a transmission from a slightly alternate history, an oddball, wordy alternative to the adventure-game paradigm set by The Legend of Zelda, one which trades the original Zelda’s emphasis on the tricky and diffuse role-player’s pleasures of “immersion” and A Link to the Past's complexly interlocking dungeons for a satisfying sequence of problems. It feels like the kind of thing ripe for a System Erasure-esque modernist take on, if there isn't one already. There probably is! I'll let you know if I find it. Goodbye!

Sixteen notes on "Blue Prince"

2025-04-21T00:00:00Z

Hi! The part where I’m actually talking about the game starts at #6. The rest is more “meta” (ew) stuff that might or might not interest you. Okay, later!

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A COUPLE OF NOTES ON TALKING ABOUT THE GAME

Here is a warning: I am on board with 100% of the hype. Recency bias and all that, but this game feels like one of the best things I’ve ever played in my entire life. As a result, this letter runs the risk of feeling comically hyperbolic.
So it is worth noting at the top that I do believe the consensus is somewhat deceptive, because it’s definitely a bristlier and more niche game than it lets on. It’s ultimately a roguelike, I think, which means that solving a puzzle intellectually does not mean you have the immediate capacity to implement that solution, which can be annoying. (More on stuff being annoying later.) It’s also a classic give it 20 hours/the game *really *starts after the credits type of game which, you know. I mean, it’s true—but you know. For my part, it took me fifteen or twenty hours to hit credits; I’ve now sunk about sixty hours into the game—not counting the time I’ve spent staring at notes and screenshots—and I don’t feel particularly close to being “done.”
Why would the consensus be deceptive? In the most general terms, I think that Blue Prince is a game in a strange little sort-of-subgenre I am very fond of, one that is uniquely difficult to review. These are games where the process of discovering the mechanics is an intrinsic part of the game experience. Two games like this I think I’ve talked about here are Animal Well and *Void Stranger *(which is, as far as I can tell, maybe the closest spiritual relative to Blue Prince, though the experience and gameplay and overall vibes are very, very different); NieR: Automata is another, less severe example. In an important sense, it is a “spoiler” to describe how you literally play these games. But because the way a game works is an intrinsic part of whether or not it is “fun”—that is, because enjoying a game is (usually) beholden to whether or not you enjoy actually engaging in the mechanics—this means that a review which avoids properly describing a game in order to preserve the integrity of an experience cannot fully serve the function of guiding the consumer. And while guiding the consumer is a “lower” function than other kinds of review, maybe, given that they just announced that the new Mario Kart is gonna be eighty freaking smackeroos, I can’t but think it’s still kind of important. (Though will anyone not buy Mario Kart World because the reviews said it wasn’t good? In what world would the reviews even say that? Who knows! Not me.)
I don’t have a solution to this! Nor does there necessarily need to be one, especially given the ease of returning a game on Steam or whatever. Maybe the only real lesson is the perennial one that Metacritic sucks and is bad; whatever the case, I think this problem is interesting. Luckily, I do not consider any of the information in any of these letters to be advice, because why on Earth would you take advice from someone like me, so it’s not my problem. Good luck!

IMPLICATION OF ABOVE NOTES

In order to talk about *Blue Prince *meaningfully, there might be what you would consider spoilers in here. If you’re in early days with the game, enjoying it, and want to completely avoid these, ignore the e-mail, maybe. Or maybe not! I talk about it all in pretty broad terms—most of what I’m talking about is either basic mechanics or capable of being inferred from a handful of documents in rooms you’ll see in the first few hours of gameplay. (At least, I hope and think that’s the case!! Forgive me if it’s not!!!) But it’s worth noting I don’t think you should be *too *worried about leaving the experience 100% Perfectly Uncontaminated. There’s so much in the game that anything in here that could be a spoiler probably won’t make any sense anyway, and there are five thousand other things to learn in the meantime. I do talk about basic narrative stuff; and while I have only figured most of this out in the last dozen or so hours, this is not because it is gated in any particularly difficult or interesting way, but because I am stupid. Anyway, the video game:

BLUE PRINCE (2025)

Blue Prince thematizes the lonely, magical experience of single-player video games. It is about what is sorrowful and gorgeous in the experience of you and the strange glowing screen, the visual and physical interface which transmutes occulted and abstracted textual-numerical codes into a kind of private synesthetic reality. It’s a game about one person wandering empty hallways over and over again, but the deeper you go, the closer proximity you feel to the spirit of the creators and the world they’ve built. Each person’s progress through the game is, in my experience of talking to people about it, wildly different—your progress through Blue Prince will not be the same as anyone else’s, and this feels special and beautiful.

Like* Elden Ring*, it is a game built around the sorrow and grandeur of ruins. It’s legitimately shocking how rich and well-realized and *buried *the narrative is. There’s a genuinely unbelievable level of confidence oozing from this game’s design. That the narrative you are uncovering happens to connect the pedagogical process by which you learn how to play a roguelike to the experience of sifting through the spiritual and material ruins of authoritarianism is extremely wild to me. (More on that soon.)

Warning: I was taking these screenshots just for myself so I didn’t turn off the annoying Steam UI shit. It feels almost sacrilegious to have that garbage in there but just know that e.g. the frame counter/screenshot notification are NOT in the regular UI lol

It’s beautiful! It’s beautiful to look at. It’s beautiful to listen to. For a game obsessed with depth, the surfaces sure are beautiful. I’ve never seen video game art quite like it: the dark-outlined, almost cel-shaded shapes; the meticulously intricate maps and symbols. The sound design is minimal and accurate and thoroughly persuasive. The music is great. Great woodwind writing in particular. Sonorities, timbres, etc. It’s a very cohesive aesthetic vision. The spaces you’re in are good spaces to hang out in.

Because I’ve wanted to talk with people about this game because it’s driving me insane (in a good way), I’ve wound up arguing on the internet about it way more than I usually do these days. Though I’m extremely careful to hedge all my comments, because I am very nice or whatever, it is a uniquely maddening game to argue about—and I’m sure it’s equally uniquely maddening on the other side of the argument, the “why does this thing everyone likes actually suck” side of it—because the complaints people have about it are complaints about the design decisions that not only make the game great to play, but serve as the backbone of what I feel to be the game’s genuine existential wisdom.

1. The most common complaint I’ve seen is that the randomized roguelike nature of the game does not allow you to solve the puzzles it seems to want you to solve. This is true; it does this. If I were more attached to conventional environmental puzzle games (though I’ve do enjoy them), or if I didn’t like roguelikes so much (though I’ve only been really into them for a few months), I would potentially be disappointed by this. 2. Blue Prince, I’d argue, is actually very well-balanced game. Like all good roguelikes, it feels, at first, like it’s all random. Unless you get the jetpack in Spelunky, you’ll never get to the end; unless you get materials for a specific build early in Slay the Spire, you’ll never get past Act 2. But like both of those games, the more you learn, the more you learn this isn’t true. Besides, like both of those games, runs are quick and easy to start over; unlike conventional roguelikes, Blue Prince is actually quite generous with its permanent upgrades.1 Your task feels impossible at first but it isn’t, and not for any twitch-skill reasons. It’s trying to teach you how to see something that was there all along.

In any case, *Blue Prince *is *not *a conventional puzzle game, though it has puzzles in it, and it builds on the legacy of puzzle games. It has the scaffolding and structure of a roguelike—is, I’d say, a roguelike. But it’s not a conventional roguelike, either. It’s a new kind of game, I’d say, one which uses the friction between the two genres it draws upon not merely to generate excitement and pleasure for the player—though it does do this—but in order to make a statement about the relationship between desire and reality.

The game, like most games, frames itself as something to be beaten. The goal, established in the beginning, is to get to the secret room in the big house. When you get there, you win! This, like so much in the game, is intentionally deceptive, a carefully-laid red herring: a trick. But it’s not a mean trick, one that gets you for no reason. The game’s setup is a trick because the game is telling a story about the falsity of grand, dominating narratives; moreover, realizing that the game’s setup is a trick facilitates an epiphany, and the game wants you to have epiphanies, because it is also about the nature of epiphanies.

The game is tutorialized oddly—information often comes later than you’d expect. But the game will also just straight-up tell you the answers to puzzles if you wait long enough and keep poking around. It will instruct you, step-by-step, how to get places you’d like to get. Not everything, and not quickly, but it’ll give you so much. It is generous, but through a door you weren’t expecting. This, too, is on purpose, and of a piece with the broader design. 2. There are dozens and dozens of mysteries buried in Blue Prince; the miracle of the game is that they all fold back into the game’s essential unity. Each and every room has something to give you. And while it’s fun and satisfying to try to get to Room 46—and you have to pursue this goal in order to get to a lot of other stuff—it’s through the other mysteries offered by the game that it becomes genuinely profound. 3. What do we leave behind? The forces that purport to control reality would have us believe our legacies are nothing but expressions of allegiance or accidental testimonies to the futility of resistance. But this isn’t true. That the house is ephemeral, that each room and synergy and tool is a fleeting gift, and we don’t know when they’ll come back—this can be annoying and frustrating, sure. But it’s a necessary expression of the game’s central concerns: time, and loss, and repetition, and the tragic, beautiful endlessness of struggle. In a literal way, the game’s occasion is grief: the house is your inheritance, accessible to you only because the Baron has died. And there’s so much more to grieve that you, the player, will learn about as the game progresses. But what frustrates and brutalizes us about the passage of time—the flaw in the fabric of reality that gives us the most miserable, meaningless pain we will feel in our agonizingly short lives—is also what allows us the only chances we will ever have. These chances, too, are fleeting, impossible to grasp in ways that are often annoying, or disappointing, or devastating; but they are real. Time occasions grief, but it’s also why the future is unpredictable, and this unpredictability is the ground and foundation of all of our hope. Fascism is built on the nightmarish assumption of immortality—we can bring the past back, exactly as you remember it, better than ever, forever—but it can’t erase the unavoidable reality that there are surprises yet to come, and that no force on Earth, no matter how materially or ideologically powerful, can really, truly, perfectly predict the future. Maybe most of the surprises yet to come will be bad; maybe almost all of them will be. But some of them, hard as this can be to believe, won’t. We don’t know what we’ll learn in advance of when we learn it, and what we learn has the possibility to change our lives. We will turn some corner and a vista we hadn’t expected will present itself, bearing forth a grandeur that instantly becomes a part of us, for as long as we are here. It might even be true, really true, that what will survive of us is love.

Before you get mad at me—I mean, nobody here ever gets mad at me; thanks everyone—but before, for the first time ever, you get mad at me: I know this makes it more of a “roguelite” than a “roguelike.” I just don’t like looking at the word “roguelite” very much. Diet Roguelike. JV Roguelike? *Blue Prince *is kind of a Roguelike, Jr. ↩

Some games of 2024

2025-02-09T00:00:00Z

Greetings, dear readers! I hope you are doing well, or as well as can currently be done!

2024 was probably the first year of my life where I “kept up with new releases” in any aesthetic medium. The medium, of course, was VIDEO GAMES. It was pretty fun, if expensive, and intermittently unsatisfying; I beat fewer games than I usually do, which is fine, I guess, but also annoying. Frustrating, too, to miss many surely delightful entries, or to be exactly one hour into them. Still! It is always nice to have a project. In any case, my computer broke, so I am probably going to miss some of 2025’s shinier upcoming delights, but you know. There’s lots of stuff to do. Or so I’m told.

In any case, here are some of my favorites that came out last year. This will probably comprise a little series, unless I forget to write the other ones. See you later!

Dragon’s Dogma 2

This game is one of several from the year that feels like it exploded into consciousness and then disappeared. It sold hilariously well, considering it is a sequel to a famously off-kilter PS3 game; I don’t necessarily know why it dropped off the map, because I think it reviewed pretty well, too, and it seems, to me at least, like it kind of rules. Perhaps it was I who dropped off the map. It’s happened before (as you, dear reader, know better than anyone).

I like this game a lot. Some of this, perhaps too much of it, is because I like the idea of it. Capcom did some wacky stuff this year (more on Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess later), which I admire, and this game is deeply wacky. It feels meticulously crafted, even modern, in some regards (beautiful environments, many ways to approach things, a focus on “emergent gameplay”), but there are also, like, four enemy types, and you basically have to walk everywhere. The first mode of fast-travel that exists is this horse-drawn carriage situation, and more likely than not you’ll get mugged by a massive monster en route. I could not tell you a thing about the story, though I remember an elaborate stealth sequence culminating in a chat with a brothel mistress, or something? That was cool.

In any case, I am aware that this is not a compelling pitch. Nearly everyone I know who gave it a try hated it; it certainly takes a while to open up. But, for me at least, it did indeed began to add up to something strange and genuinely surprising: handsomely uncanny. Open-world exploration felt rewarding in a way it hadn’t for me since Elden Ring, and maybe never had before that. It really does look very good! At least it did before my computer broke. But don’t go into it expecting anything like that, really. Most of the joy I derived from my 40 hours (I never completed it, unfortunately) in Dragons Dogma 2 emerged from a kind of very amused awe that this was a thing I could buy and play on my computer. You spend most of the game accompanied by “pawns” – custom-made NPCs (well, you make one pawn, and the rest are others’) who function as your party and say the same ten things over and over and over again. These absurdly obsequious, hilariously repetitive companions began to feel like a riff on the very idea of an RPG party – like, if the insight of the post-Final Fantasy IV JRPG is an understanding of the party as narrative engine and core, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is the opposite of that. It takes as its center the thing that’s unrealistic about any narrative where you’re the chosen one, and then builds this mythos and mechanical structure around that, one that feels somehow both profound and totally half-assed.

This is an overreading, I know, and it’s certainly not one which will convert any skeptics. Many have said it feels out of time in a funny way – the comparison point I most often hear is the PS3 (probably not incidentally, the first Dragon’s Dogma came out on PS3). It feels like the surreality and crunchiness of Dark Souls (sorry!!) extended laterally into the world itself. What is hard and rewarding about moving through Sen’s Fortress or whatever is now almost conceptually hard. It’s just a weird fucking time. I want to finish my playthrough, but I’ve heard the ending sucks, but this seems appropriate, somehow. The magic trick of making it so it owns when something sucks is probably evidence of a personal problem rather than a quality inherent to a work of art; however, smoke ’em, as I always say, if you got ’em. When you cook a steak in camp a video of a real life cooking steak plays, and when they asked the director why he said a real steak looks more realistic than an animated steak, and that’s why Dragons Dogma 2 is one of my favorite games of 2024.

Balatro lol

Animal Well

I’ve heard it said by a few different people (including someone on Friday: if you’re reading this, hello!) that a good puzzle game sort of tricks you into feeling smart—it leads you right up to the answer, way closer than you think you are, and then leaves just enough room for you to make the leap and receive a happy click of insight. By this metric, I think Animal Well is a great puzzle game. But there’s something else going on here, too. I was reminded while playing of this bit from designer Derek Yu’s book about the making of Spelunky (my actual game of the year of 2024, but more on that later), written by a judge describing Spelunky’s appeal:

With Spelunky, you are never learning a “piece” of music… It’s still a game about repetition and learning, but what you are learning is the overall composition, understanding the overall system and how it works, and becoming fluent in that [...] Spelunky looks like a game of execution, but it’s really a game about information and decision-making. How good are you at looking at a situation and understanding what it means? [...] You must rely on your literacy of the system, and this is a kind of holistic knowledge that feels great in my brain, a wonderful new flavor for a single-player game, and a deeply promising direction for further exploration.

One of the organizing premises of Spelunky (adopted from earlier roguelikes, as the book explains) is the idea that every object in the game follows the same rules as all the others. Everything can bump into everything else. A yeti can pick up and throw you just like you can pick up and throw a bomb. The altar on which you sacrifice incapacitated enemies (and allies) kills you if you find yourself incapacitated on it. The manic comedy of dying in Spelunky emerges from the sheer quantity of unanticipated outcomes a closed system with shockingly few variables can generate; the process of interpreting and negotiating endlessly new iterations of this system is both mechanically and cognitively satisfying.

Unlike Spelunky, Animal Well’s is world is thoroughly bespoke—it’s maybe the most meticulously, rigorously designed video game world I’ve ever engaged with. And to be sure, there’s a lot of carefully concealed hand-holding; you are closer at all times to the solutions than you feel yourself to be, and your sense that you are God’s biggest genius after you figure something out is certainly an illusion, if a happy one. The best genre of game is “the world is fucked up. You’re a little guy” But the pleasure of Animal Well is related to Spelunky’s insofar as it both games cut you loose into a world which methodically teaches you how to interpret it. You’ll stumble into a corner that opens onto a secret passageway; and then you’ll step back and realize that the dangling vines did look a little off, didn’t they; and then when you return to an earlier room, you’ll notice that the vines look off in the same way, in a corner you haven’t explored.

This learning is in constant dialogue with the game’s progression, which consists almost exclusively in gaining new tools. You’ll face an obstacle a thousand times, laboriously learning to navigate your way around it, and then you’ll get an object that will let you bypass the obstacle entirely. The pacing of the game is as meticulous as anything else about it.

And the surprises! Really crazy stuff is constantly happening! When my mother visited me, I showed it to her because I figured she’d like how cool it looked; while her interest in video games is generally limited to Animal Crossing (though she very kindly indulges me when I babble about them), so much weird, surprising shit happened basically immediately that we wound up playing for a while and just cackling at everything. (Developers and marketers take note: if you’re trying to appeal to a wider demographic, try starting your game title with the word Animal.)

The pixel art is gorgeous, but it also serves the game’s fundamental design in a way I haven’t quite seen before: often the “tell” will be a difference of a pixel or two, in a way that feels both legible and subtle; a less rigorous aesthetic would not convey this balance as gracefully or satisfyingly. The geometry of the game is itself expressive in a way that draws out the player’s sense that they’re interacting with something not only built but built on purpose, according to a logic you can learn. It’s really good!

We interrupt this program

2024-08-22T00:00:00Z

Howdy gang,

I never really do this sort of thing, but: a very good friend of mine is currently undergoing a rough spell with some housing insecurity, etc. Beyond being a stellar writer, which he is, LP’s encouragement and care have impacted me more than I could possibly say; I would not be the writer or person I am today if not for him. Any donations to him would mean a lot to me.

Here is the link:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-lp-kindreds-journey-to-finish-his-ba

Anyway, I’ve got more writing about freaking video games or whatever coming soon enough. Love you! Goodbye!