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Having devoted a lot of time to thinking about the construction of the Character Web, I'm increasingly frustrated when people fail to grasp the importance of it.

This has always been true to some extent, but I'm watching Media Club Plus talk about the Sopranos. Very light spoilers for the moment, though I'm sure I'll talk about the Sopranos again at a later date.

A teenage girl drinks in the park with her friends in one episode and Keith from the podcast makes a point to discuss that this would never work because the typical understanding of a brown paper bag is that it disguises public drinking (thus making a legal gray area) and these girls are underage, so it wouldn't matter that it's disguising it and they would get arrested.

And it's something he wants to point out because he finds it funny, I'm sure, but it's so uninteresting texturally. Why does it matter that it doesn't work in real life? The more interesting thing is whether it works in the show. This is never thrown into conflict. They don't get busted or nearly busted but bailed out by the plausible deniability, but this moment of discussion highlighted the divide in thinking for me.

Keith is very fixated on reality and in this instance it didn't matter, but in others it becomes a problem because he cannot synthesize other perspectives in his real life experience. Character motivations are limited to what he can understand and what rings true in real life, or relegated to the spaces of badly written or unrealistic.

In a character web, it doesn't matter what's true in reality. If the show includes several instances of people drinking with a brown paper bag and they never get busted from it no matter how outrageous, that's simply not a consequence that is possible within the bounds of the show. It's a weird thing, perhaps, but that in itself is interesting. What do the writers want to accomplish? Do they simply want to include a lot of public drinking? Is it crucial to their characterization? Is there something about public drinking that they're able to either state or metaphorize because of this decision?

Put it another way. In Star Wars, very few people ever get seriously harmed by blaster fire when there's a Jedi or Sith on the screen. Maybe extras on the sidelines will take damage at the periphery of battle, but Han Solo is not going down to a random shot from an expert marksman.

Meanwhile, something more grounded, something like Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers may consider it a worthwhile move to let a main character die to a random hail of gunfire because it portrays the horrors of war and its senseless violence.

And then we take Lord of the Rings, something informed by a man who spent a lot of time thinking about war though not trying to make a war story. What does Tolkien portray insofar as the deaths on screen are concerned? Who dies in battle and when? Do Frodo and Sam fall to a random arrow and end the narrative or is it more interesting that the violence portrayed has some kind of sense because the narrative wants to stress that heroes can prevail against all odds not because that's how reality is but because perhaps that's how it ought to be.

And consider the conversations in Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. The lowest rung of comments are off-handed things like, "Why didn't they just fly the ring to Mordor?" or "Why is every single storm trooper the worst shot?" And the answers are pretty simple. It's not the story they wanted to tell. An interesting question is why not? Because it's not a story of easy answers. It's a story of sacrifice and hardship and the goodness prevailing. Or it's a story about the heroism and grace of a people who take full control of their emotions rather than let it rule them.

These aren't perfect ideas, but they're arguments and to engage with them is to be in conversation with the writing itself rather than the narrowed band possible by saying, "well that's realistic" or "these characters are stupid for not behaving in a way I find to be smart."

Booktalk!

For the end of the year, I wanted to do some retrospectives. I think I'll do one for games and movies, but looking back on the books I've read so far this year, I realized I probably have a lot more to say than should be married to an already long post (or, one that will probably be long if we know me).

So, let's just jump in! A lot to cover.

I set a reading challenge for 52 books this year, aka one book per week and I accomplished it sometime mid November! (Yay!) It honestly felt like a natural amount for me. I'd love to read more, but that's always going to be true. In real life, I never felt pressured by it in a negative way. I started the year strong and then anytime I saw the "you are 5 books ahead of schedule" dip any lower I'd reprioritize reading and it always felt like a helpful reminder.

What follows won't be a discussion of every book, just the things I find notable from this list in chronological order.

The first book I read this year was Listen for the Lie by Amy Tintera, an audiobook I saw a friend read and I was excited by the praises they were singing about it. I really enjoyed the narrator, listening to her perspective as the villain in the stories of so many other people and overall the mystery and characters both ended up really hitting for me.

Then I continued the catch-up I was doing on Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children series. It's hard to talk any specifics, but let me just note that the series is so close to my heart. Lonely, broken little girls finding hope by any means necessary, even as they're thrust into perilous danger while there are people around them who desperately wish the best for them. Just beautiful work from one of my favorite authors and the two I read here were no different.

And then I got really into a manga called The Blue Period by Tsubasa Yamaguchi. As someone in her second year of learning art, I've had a lot of good praise of my growth and discussion about all of it from two artists I trust, my partner and one of my best friends. But I never really saw for myself what it's like in art communities. And while I still wouldn't call myself knowledgeable, seeing Tsubasa Yamaguchi's take on art school and what being an artist looks like was a really exciting space. There were many moments I relayed a chapter's main issues to my partner and they responded that it's fairly true to life and many moments learning art when I've gone: Oh, it's like The Blue Period! Which is silly, but really fun.

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu was a really hard read, but a rewarding one as well. It's essentially an anthology of short stories set in a world taken by an awful virus. Some of the stories are interconnected in surprising ways, but all of them showcase a panoramic view of how human beings might deal with a brutal world. The answer spans the scope of desperate and at times ugly kindness all the way to their own brutality in turn, but the stories stay heart wrenching throughout.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones was a wonderful revenge story. It's a slow burn in the way the best Stephen Graham Jones stories can be. You're presented with the world as it is and as it was and watch as the microaggressions telegraph the eventual violence their Civility conceals. Gruesome and beautiful, what a disquieting ride.

Young Ladies Don't Play Fighting Games by Eri Ejima was a joy. I'm a girl who's loved fighting games for over a decade and a half and who has been following the pro scene as well as attended a couple tournaments myself. Seeing a manga about girls who were more obsessive than me finding community through it was pure bliss. However, it's really hard to recommend because they involve a level of technical expertise that strives so hard to explain itself that it actually might require expertise to understand. For me though? Perfect and a good reprieve from the last two!

Overgrowth by Seanan McGuire -- Okay, an invasion of plant aliens and an allegory for the autistic experience written with such heartrending accuracy and earnestness? Just beautiful. It left me sitting in the quiet, staring in thought once it was over and I am happy to devote more words to describing how much I love Seanan's work.

Deadstream by Mar Romasco-Moore -- oh, man a book version of one of my favorite popcorn genres: security cam horror/computer horror. There's a streamer who's haunted but everything about streaming culture and gaming culture really rang true here. Ultimately I don't love the landing, but I mean I rarely do in the movie version of this. If you love movies Unfriended, Searching, and Ratter and can handle Twitch speak, it's definitely worth checking out.

Ocean's Godori by Elaine U. Cho was a fantastic book. It's basically the kind of space opera I wish I could see more of, especially on screen. It's a very character driven story about a hotshot gunslinger/pilot named Ocean, her best friend, a hot politician's son, a death-rite priest in training, and enough fun crewmates to crowd a ship all trying to untangle a huge conspiracy. Just a blast and its sequel also dropped this year, capping off a hell of a duology.

Neuromancer by William Gibson. Yeah, that one, the original. I hadn't gotten through it after a lifetime of being a sci-fi fan, but honestly I got too bogged down in the details everytime I tried. This time, with the help of Shelved by Genre (a heavy book discussion podcast), I was able to just kind of wade into it and let it all wash over me and found that it was mostly just a really exciting and thoughtful heist story. I'm really eager to finish off the trilogy, hopefully next year.

Home Sick Pilots by Dan Watters and Caspar Wjingaard. I got into this one largely on its premise: what if a haunted house was a mech? But ultimately I loved the outsider story it told and I loved Caspar's art style throughout. I've spent a lot of this year learning what I want out of stylizing in my art and I took a lot of big lessons from Caspar.

The Stormlight Archives by Brandon Sanderson, first three books. I got into the first book ages ago, nearly a decade. I was taken by it, but also these books aren't just doorstoppers, they're doorcrackers. They're all around 1200 pages and only getting bigger every time you look away and I just didn't have the patience to take on another back then. This year I came to them just wanting some big, fantasy story that would let me get to know characters for ages, so basically the perfect mindset. I really enjoyed seeing Sanderson wrestle with the concept of leadership and heroics and, as a writer, it was wild seeing what he was willing to spend his words on. I mean, it's so hard from the other side. Knowing you can take your time is a novel (~) concept, but this man truly spent hundreds of words discussing how to carry a ladder (reductive, but not untrue). I sound like I'm doing it a disservice, but really I don't think I want to try and get anyone to read 3600 pages of it without having the self-motivation for it and if anything I said sounds interesting, go for it!

That'll do it for this year. I've read more books. I've had more thoughts, felt more things, but I think I did my year justice. Looking forward to the next one~

Current Mood: content
Current Location: at my desk
Current Music: the tikky takky of my keys

This year I've had a hell of a time transitioning from drawing from reference and in realism to drawing from imagination and stylized.

I was never a realism person. I think it can be beautiful, but to me it's never been as enticing as stylized work. Because of this, I've never really understood why the layman loves realism so much. As I learned more about art, however, I learned that my ability to discuss and think about art has improved and thus I have the language and understanding to appreciate different parts of it as well as different styles and adaptations.

And honestly my conclusion is that it's goddamn hard to stylize and draw from imagination! I'm not at all against using references, but I've been in the pursuit of the kind of understanding that makes references a thing I can glance at to jog my memory rather than something I have to spend ages learning from every time. I don't want to use a reference to learn what a head looks like from a 70 degree ccw rotation and a 30 degree vertical rotation up, I want to have an idea in my head of what that'll look like and then use the reference to double check. This isn't about pride, but rather speed. The more I understand, the faster I can be.

And stylization! It's a deceptively digestible concept to make something simpler, but the act of designing pleasing shapes? Realism is a single point and you can move away from it in any direction. Even just talking about drawing, you can squish your shapes, you can pull them. You can use several straight lines in place of curves. You can use very few straight lines and make a very angular shape. And then, in the midst of making all these adjustments you have to look at the whole and decide: do I like this? And then, based on your goal, you have to consider things like speed, ease of rotation, if they're fun to draw.

The pursuit of all of these things has taken so much time to get to a point where I'm starting to feel like I've got it under my hands, but it's also really rewarding! I've been experimenting so much and getting my drawings to look pleasing to me is so freaking cool.

I just sometimes wish I could show all the work I've done to, say, my mother and get something other than, "that's cool." Though, she did like the smurfette I drew on her card from a reference, so. I guess it's not all bad.

Current Mood: cheerful

I've been thinking a lot about my art and about the journey I've been on and I wanted to walk through it and through a lot of the decisions I've made with regards to what I chase and what I work on. Being that I want to do it in a structured way, I figured I should write it down. 506 is a random day, almost round but not quite. Still, every other time I've thought to sit down and do this, every round number I've come across I was busy, so may as well do it here.

I started with drawing fundamentals January 7th, 2024 from a generously gifted course and it set off a series of chain reactions in my brain. It's difficult to express the full and complete changes my thinking has undergone with this new set of lenses, but I do feel different and that's significant.

I remember the first moments where I realized I'd made good, recognizable images and the joy I felt. Proko's course is designed around this outcome to build confidence, of course, but nevertheless it's very effective. I'd spent decades flirting with the idea of becoming an artist, trying to draw and getting discouraged and then finally holding an image that I made that looked how I wanted was revolutionary and it made me ravenous.

I followed the course until I ran out of lessons. They were adding more weekly, but it wasn't fast enough for me and so I took another generously gifted course on shading from another source and once I grasped the fundamentals I practiced it and added it to my other practice until my brain started to long for color.

I started digital painting, which seemed like the best way not to overwhelm myself with decision (and was gifted a spare tablet). I loved painting and it gave me a feeling of such intense pleasure that I knew I would get absorbed if I let myself. And, though I DID want to let myself I recognized that there were a lot of places where I felt hesitant and all of that came down to weaknesses in my understanding and I knew I'd remedy it if I went back to focusing on drawing.

At a certain point, an art supply blind box gift led me to starting physical media and though it intimidated me at first, I quickly realized it was just fun and playful in a way I hadn't experienced with digital media. Something about pencil and pen and marker moving on paper made me understand what the digital spaces were trying to emulate and that elevated my digital work once more. I experimented in watercolor, gouache, and just this month I tried oil for the first time but we'll get there.

I began to work through more and more ideas of what I thought were interesting. I drew from reference photos, from manga and anime, from anything I watched, from games I played. Every image that I thought was interesting, I went and tried to recreate it and insodoing I began to understand what I thought was most fascinating to depict.

My interests are largely expressive! I have very little interest in realism except that learning it improves my art. I love value, probably from my time in photography, and I have adored learning the ways to depict light and shadow and the ways they describe forms. I love people, not static images like portraits (though they are fun), but rather illustrations of them in action, in movement, capturing gesture and expression, capturing life. I love color! I love the ways that colors play off of each other, I love learning what strong effects look like, I love what limited palettes and value scales can do to images. I love thinking about image compositions! I'm not at the point where I'm making many of my own compositions of large pieces, but I do think that the logic of it is fascinating.

Every time in my studies where I've encountered something I didn't know, I've gone on to figure out more of it. And not because I am unhappy! I love my art. I love the things I make and the ways that I make them. They're frequently not professional level and that's okay! I'm not a professional! I feel like an intermediate artist now with the ways I think about it all and every conversation I have with my partner, who has made sure this was as easy as possible for me at every step of the way, strengthens my feelings about art and my understanding of it.

This year has been harder for me. I feel like I've hit the edge of a lot of where courses can take me in terms of big, fundamental stakes, learning gesture, learning to measure angles, perspective. There's no longer a lot of things I haven't encountered yet in terms of broad umbrella concepts, just the refinement of those things and their use in concert. This has led to a lot of my progress feeling stunted for the first bit of the year.

But then I found something that vexed me, an inability to rotate a person in space, which the youtube video I was watching took no issue with and continued on quickly as a matter of course. This led to me taking a head and body construction course and then what amounted to a hellish month of head constructions (which involve a lot of 3D boxes until you can understand the underlying shapes of things), but afterwards I feel so much stronger in drawing consistent people and that's so much fun!

I tried oil painting a couple of weeks ago and I truly forgot that I hate the feeling of oil in general. Cooking oil, any kind of grease? Awful textures that I get away from as much as possible. Unfortunately, oil felt much the same and despite its clay-like blending, something I really enjoyed, the feeling of my brush on the paper, the feeling of CLEANING DOWN after? Miserable.

BUT It made me miss watercolor and now I'm in a watercolor course enjoying the hell out of painting once more and I just had to think about how I got here. If, at any moment, I had stopped learning I think I'd have been really unhappy with the places I'd have gotten stuck on. Instead, focusing on an ever-broadening and even pursuit of the skills that all work to benefit one another, I've become a fairly well rounded artist and right now I'm taking three courses that will only continue to make me a better one. I simply and truly have been having a blast.

This book is fascinating and I typically like to wait until I finish something to start in on my commentary and analysis (at least in long-form), but there's so much here that I want to document considering I'm barely 20% through the book.

There will be spoilers.

Firstly, there is this story being told in triplicate that I find extremely exciting. The first is the story of a white academic who has won access to her great (times x) grandfather's diary, which she believes will give her a leg-up academically and establish her in her career. The second is the diary itself. Her ancestor is a Lutheran priest from 300 years ago who is documenting a confession given to him by a Native American man named Good-Stab (whose physical traits include the scar on his cheek, the robes of a holy man he wears, and his dark spectacles). The third is Good-Stab's confession, which takes place over many days and he asserts that his story will encompass his long, long life of over 300 years.

So already this is interesting, but the thread is pulled taut across all three hoops, giving perspectives of the same thread. The Academic only thinks of her career and thinks of it as a story at first, while the Lutheran Priest couches every bit of his recounting in doubts. There is a willingness for him to go along with the narrative of savagery within the Native people, to infantilize Good-Stab and to constantly speak of his pity for his people and their certainly-soon demise, as he sees it. It's not often I read books that include the POV of someone who thinks this way and Stephen Graham Jones accomplishes it with a lot of authenticity. And finally, Good-Stab's narration comes from this place of deep understanding both of the place he's allowed to occupy in white society as well as of his own experiences he's recounting with a mind for translation both literal and local, though he gets too distracted to accomplish his localizing when he gets deep in the heat of his retelling. (The Lutheran Priest considers his antiquated way of speaking an attempt to sound intellectual, which I don't think is correct, but it accomplishes both that infantilization and also his disbelief in Good-Stab's story in a single move, an economic piece of writing that this story is laden with).

I'm fascinated to see where this is going. These are only the containers within which this story operates. I am excited for all of it to crash over me at once sometime soon.

Current Mood: chipper
Current Location: at my desk
Current Music: assassin's creed menu music

I played a bunch of games this week, so! May as well document them!

Needy Streamer Overload
This was a game on sale for $6 for a steam Visual Novel event and the ideas were just interesting enough to catch my eye. Namely, you play as a streamer's partner/manager, 'suggesting' (but really commanding) different actions which raise or lower 3 different meters (stress, affection (towards you), and mental 'darkness'). Activities take time but will reward you with 'stream ideas' like conspiracy theory stream, gaming stream, 'sexy' stream. These streams will raise followers and stress and during these streams you, as the chat moderator, can pick messages to delete and donation-highlighted messages to pick for your streamer/partner to respond to after the stream.

It was a really interesting series of things to mechanize and it ended up squarely in a toxic relationship environment with about sixteen different endings. I didn't enjoy playing it so much as reading through the endings and seeing what kinds of things the game was interested in saying.

As someone who's streamed and modded a lot with various relationships to those streamers and who has heard more than enough stories of mod-streamer relationships going awry, this was a fascinating look into someone else's perspective on the office.

I can't really recommend it, but it was interesting!

Emily is Away <3
Also from the VN sale, this one was a single dollar and the premise sounded interesting enough to check it out. You play in 2008 solely through a facebook interface. In theory not much is different from a visual novel; you have options to pick in a dialogue with various characters. However, the trappings do give it a sort of a Web/Social Media Horror movie style interface, which I am a sucker for. Ultimately there isn't much horror here save for the hormonal naivete of teens, but I was pretty sold from go.

What I didn't anticipate, however, was how well the developers would capture the conceit and vibe of being on 2008 Facebook. Compared to places like AOL Instant Messenger, MySpace, Tumblr, or eventually even Twitter, there was an amount of dressing up I was familiar with. After all, it's a place where families ended up going, somewhere with whole-ass government names (chilling to think of now). You start with a nigh on, "Hello, my name is..." and have to warm up to people to devolve into the actual internet dialects particular to the time (emoticons, extra letters for emphasis).

All of this really led to my immersion and a sense of placeness. I didn't feel like I WAS my character (though, as I almost always regret, I did name my character after me, so sometimes when people said my name I got jumpscared). But the experience of her and her high school friends did feel genuine, complete with a lack of experience navigating complicated social spaces, which I can now navigate via my Adult Brain, but it was fascinating and tragic being in there once again.

It was definitely a fun experience and I do recommend it if any of that sounds fun.

One Lonely Outpost
Honestly I don't have a ton to say about this one. It's a sci-fi stardew, which is interesting to me conceptually, but the inventory management was both unintuitive and clunky, which led to me tapping out before long.

Can't recommend.

Star Trucker
I finally got around to trying this and at first it seemed really interesting. A mix of the driving sims I enjoy like American Truck Simulator while simultaneously giving me a space ship game I'm always yearning for. At the end of the day, though, I haven't found the drive (ha) to return. They abridge space travel quite a bit by having jump gates between stations, but because of that everything does feel rather samey. "Long-hauls" mean 9 jumps instead of 1-3, which is basically like driving to a freeway, driving down the off ramp, driving to another on ramp, driving off of another off ramp, never experiencing the middle part which, to me, is the 'stuff' of road trips.

It's especially egregious because there's so much potential to repair a ship. There are mechanics built around exchanging batteries, managing power, even doing space walks to repair leaks in the hull. However, if you're always 5 minutes from a gas station, the fear of breaking down is far less exciting.

I may come back to it and have a road to damascus moment but until then.

Can't recommend.

Monster Hunter Wilds
Ultimately I've been really enjoying Monster Hunter Wilds. I'm, as they say, an old head when it comes to this series. I've been playing since Freedom Unite on the PSP and at least touching every entry if not completing it.

This new one is beautiful. I've heard of performance issues, but I haven't encountered any and so can't speak to that. Instead, I am a little put off by the pacing of it. I've put maybe 7 hours into the game so far and it does feel like most of that is cutscenes. Even if it isn't true, every stage surrounding a hunt feels really inundated with them. For the most part they're just 'fine' but there are aspects I like including some of the characters, so I do want to see them (even if just to have references for drawing them later).

I've seen other old heads complain that it's too easy and there are things that make it easier for sure, but personally I've fallen out of love with the 30+ minute hunts while grinding for items. Did it extend the game quite a bit? Sure but so too did all the rough systems that went into trying to get kids to eat through their quarters in arcades and I'm not looking to defend those. Mostly, I think the hunts are fun and I think the custcenes help to make them quite cinematic, a thing Monster Hunter has struggled with for as long as I've been playing. Most of the drama has come from emergent gameplay, one last faint for the team and someone throws a really precise bomb that interrupts the charging monster absolutely about to gore your friend into nullifying the last 30 minutes of your lives.

Instead, every monster they introduce gets some kind of pomp and circumstance and there's a lot more world building on the hunter's side to consider. (At least for me; I realize there could have been a lot of lore in the prior games but I simply couldn't be bothered to read through a novel of text prior to a hunt.)

Recommend if hunting the big monsters sounds fun

Conclusion
That about wraps it up for me! See you next time I have a lot to talk about.

Oh and last week I played Bloom and Rage and it was incredible. I have a lot to say, generally, though, and I'm still stewing on it. Recommend if you like character focused stories about weird girls in a summer-movie style environment.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: my desk
Current Music: the fan whirring

AnswerInProgress, a team of three people who produce video essays on their research journeys to find answers to questions that bother them, recently released a video titled "why nobody knows what curry is." Like all their videos, there's a disconnect of gravity between the lowkey, almost solely lowercase titles, the roads they travel, and the destinations they arrive at. Partially through the conceit of finding enough to talk about to make a video, they almost never arrive at a solution or answer that they expected and sometimes they even find answers that invalidate their question, answering a different one instead.

"why nobody knows what curry is" is different still, however, as it is produced like a short film rather than their typical format. The narrator and researcher of this video, Melissa Fernandes, makes a journey to understand her heritage a little better after finding some alarming claims about the word 'curry.' "As a Brown girl born and raised in Canada, I've always been a little self-conscious about my own Brownness." Fernandes says. And, as she reads online that people are claiming the use of the word 'curry' is racist as it's a colonizer term from British people who didn't care enough to learn the names of real dishes, she says, "I was really confused." This is about the time I started to get a pang in my heart.

There is a lot I can and have said about colonization. As a Native American person, I don't think I'll ever be finished saying those things, so if you want to hear all of that just stick around, read my work. However, central to my experience is the confusing mix of pain and guilt that come from finding something you thought was foundational to your culture having come from colonization rather than being intrinsic.

For me, I learned about the stereotypical, savage 'Indians' (as in Cowboys &...) before I conceptualized that I was one. One of my earliest memories is a car ride when I was four or so. I don't remember how the topic came up, but I remember the silence that came first, so I probably said something about Indians on a cartoon I watched. And then my parents, uncomfortably telling me that I was an Indian. And then me bawling my eyes out in raw panic. Clearly, from my reaction, I hadn't had any good Native American cultural representation up until that point. I remember believing that I would have to surrender my home, TV, etc to go live on the plains, living as the stereotypes do.

I have never had a strong connection to my culture. My parents and grandparents were all christian, and so any piece of the culture that would've been deemed spiritual or religious was either untrue and not worth considering or worse, silly, and though they didn't say it, savage. In fact, the only connection that I really had was the language being around me (though never taught to me) and the food even though I spent years living on the Reservation.

However, once I did start to question the world I grew up in and the prejudices I held and began the work of decolonizing my heart in my late teens, I remember being fixated on the word 'Indian.' I mean, fundamentally it's wrong, isn't it? By no metric am I from India in any way. And around this time, there was another concerted movement to say "Native American" instead, which I do get and agree with on a surface level. I don't think white people should be calling me, "Indian." For awhile I would cringe when my family would say, "Indian" or when other Natives would say it.

It was only after being in more Native spaces that I realized it started to feel inclusive. These were the same people talking about racism, talking about preserving culture, and they were using it too. And as I relaxed, I came to a similar conclusion that Melissa did about her food.

"The word curry may have started as a misunderstanding, but the more that I think about it from listening to my grandma [...] and the recipes that I cook to this day, the more I see the dishes I call curry as a symbol of connection, a way for generations to honor their roots, but with permission to evolve."

It's heartrendingly difficult to find a place to land with your culture after centuries of distributed disconnection, intentional and negligent both. It sometimes, perhaps often, feels like a losing battle to connect again. The work is never done, the fight feels never won, and so how can you have a home when you don't know if you'll ever arrive at answers, at peace and reclamation? But you have to live. Not just survive, you have to live. You have to find a way, in the shifting chaos and the raging storms, to build your home and to steal time if you must in order to craft a life. You can make a home anywhere. You can create culture anywhere. You can synthesize all the parts of yourself you found and continue to find into something new and maybe it won't be the same, but the truth is it never would be. Even if you had all the answers, even if we were in peace, you would still be something new. That's how it should be. The road always moves forward. Enjoy it whenever you can.

Recently I decided to take a break from writing Startide 4.

Note: this is not a post about me feeling bad about it! That I'm here writing it at all is solely because I want to analyze what I did here because it was fun but I think I can learn some stuff from it.

As a post-mortem for the writing up to this point:

I have been writing all my life, but I never got much practice planning and plotting. This has presented various hurdles, but recently I got to the 60% point of a story and largely fell off of it as I lost the space to land it. And so I wanted to explore what other people did to structure and plot out a story.

Before writing this draft of Startide 4, I had looked at a talk Mary Robinette Kowal gave about the MICE Quotient, which is a tool, a structure like the 3-act structure or the 5-act structure, but one that makes writing more active and goal-oriented whereas, to my taste, the 3 and 5 act structures feel more useful as diagnostic tools rather than planning and plotting tools. They simply feel too open-ended in my hands. ("Second act is 50% of the book, good luck! rising action! remember it!") (More on that on this post)

This was my first story really working with that kind of outline. I established a MICE Quotient nested set of stories and largely I think that was successful at the planning stage in terms of giving me direction, but ultimately I don't think my outline accounted for a lot of nuance, which makes sense! I mean, trying something I'm not practiced in will, of course, not turn out how I want it to the first time.

However, I think it's interesting to explore the things that didn't turn out how I wanted.

I think the largest part of this was that it became a bit cyclical. One of my ingredients was Persona and the video game structure IS cyclical and so I didn't really pay it too much mind. Dungeon arises, meet a new character, into the dungeon, debrief, dungeon arises... But I do think taking that structure hindered what might've been earlier concerns about the way the story was unfolding.

I also fell into a lull with my characters. I think also partially because of the persona influence. I wanted to spend a lot of time hanging out with characters, which made the pacing stagnate a lot and it would've been fine except I did want to reach my other pieces I had planned and that made a lot of internal tension inside of me. Ultimately, I think thinking about characters more than story affected the pacing quite a bit.

Finally, I did forget about the overall structure. Having an outline to follow meant that I was doing much fewer "little seanan"s, as I call them, which is to say using the advice Seanan McGuire gave once in an interview, which is to think of what you want to write before it's time to write it. Which sounds simple, but was revolutionary to me at the time because I was operating on, "I'll figure it out tomorrow when I write."

However, having an outline meant I was pretty confident I knew what the next day would bring, which meant I arrived every time with either a strong idea or a vague one, but nevertheless I rarely questioned the outline I had made ages ago except in short bursts that changed the lower-layer of things, story arcs and such, but not the overall structure.

These are an interesting set of mistakes and largely something I think I can work with. I think the MICE Quotient worked really well for getting me into the story, but I got complacent. I want to be more mindful of the try-fail cycles and the ways that the MICE stories they're in affect the overall tone. I'm not quite sure how to be more mindful beyond saying "be more mindful" but maybe I need to print out something and pin it behind my monitors or get a tattoo that just says "MICE"

Seriously, though, this was a really good learning experience and first attempt at using this structure seriously and I think that was worthwhile!

I do want to finish Startide and I think overall my IDEAS in here are really solid. I just have to restructure them and that's going to take some work, but! It should be fun whenever I'm up to trying it again.

For now, looking forward to what's next

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Location: at my desk
Current Music: a little stream :3

Lately I have been trying to work with the MICE Quotient as opposed to the 3 or 5 act structures.

The MICE Quotient is a tool Mary Robinette credits to Orson Scott Card, which essentially boils down to finding the kind of story you are telling and then answering the archetypal question of it.

They define four types:

M - Milieu

Driven by Place

Enter New Place -> Struggle to Exit, Try to Survive In, Attempts to Navigate -> Character exits space

I - Inquiry

Driven by Questions

Ask a Question -> Is lied to, can't understand, dead end answers -> Character answers question

C - Character

Driven by Angst

Character is unhappy with an aspect of self -> tries to change their ways, attempts to break out of role, experiences self-loathing -> they have a new understanding of self

E - Event

Driven by Action

Something disrupts status quo -> Tries to set things right, fights, chases, explodes, builds -> Status Quo Solidified, old or new

Supplemental to this is the try-fail cycle, which is are two pairs of consequences characters may receive while attempting to deal with the story they're in. The set to work from depends on where the character is in the story (walking into the problem or working their way out of it)

Establishing:

yes, but...

no, and...

Resolving:

no, but...

yes, and...

These are also colored by the type of story they're in. On the arrow paths for each type, the middle section relates what questions the try-fail cycles will answer.

For example:

In a milieu story, once entering a new place, a character might try to find their bearings so they do not feel so lost. To do so, they may try to study a map, which raises the question: Does it work? And if we're still in the first half of the story, establishing, the answer will either be "yes, but..." or "no, and..." For instance, yes, they are able to study the map, but they realize it hasn't been updated in a year so their data isn't reliable. Or perhaps, no their phone dies and, when they try to charge it, the power to their house goes out and they have to find the circuit breaker to deal with it.

And my final point on this for now is that a story may contain multiple types of stories within it. In a novel, they often will. However, they must observe a hierarchy and be nested within one another.

For example:

The Wizard of Oz

<C> Dorothy is dissatisfied with life at the farm

<E> A tornado comes to the farm

<M> Dorothy arrives in Oz

<I>What do the ruby slippers do?

</I> They carry you home

</M> Dorothy leaves Oz

</E> Kansas once more, status quo restored

</C> Didn't need to go any farther than my own backyard

For those unfamiliar with programming notation, <></> is the declaration of a block of code and to contain it within another is called nesting. <a><b></b></a> The innermost portion of a nest is resolved as soon as it comes up, but to exit a nested block you must close it in the order from smallest to greatest.

The main thrust is that the Wizard of Oz is a character story, driven by Dorothy's angst. Then a tornado comes and whisks her away to Oz, which disrupts the status quo. Oz is somewhere Dorothy knows nothing about, which means her journey also becomes driven by place, trying to navigate and explore. And then we have the question of the Ruby Slippers she was given? What do they do?

Each subsequent piece is a smaller and smaller focus of the overall, for even as Dorothy is removed from her home, even as she finds herself in a strange new place, and even though she has a strange, presumably magical item, all the while she is processing her feelings about herself and about home. In fact, each of these things act in the service of her understanding of herself and home.

And then things rapidly resolve because the resolution side of the try-fail cycle works in double time. Rather than one step forward, one step back you're at two steps forward. The slippers take her home and so she leaves Oz and insodoing restores the status quo and, newly returned from her adventure, feels at peace with herself and her place in the world.

This is the strength of the MICE Quotient, the knitting together of parts to create a coherent through line so that writers may avoid getting lost in the weeds. And there may be moments where the focus shifts, where you realize that your story was a character story but you're more interested in the Event or Inquiry nested inside, at which point it may be useful to consider whether shifting those around and restructuring would serve your story better.

2024 Writing Projects

I've done an art retrospective for my first year of making art on other social media (tumblr and bisquick) and I just realized this morning I could also do one for writing!

Learning visual art took up the largest part of my year and I think I spent it well! I have tended my plant nicely, I think. However, I did get some writing done and had some fun ideas!

My goal for 2025 is to do a lot more with my writing, so my intention is to make shorter works. Novellas, short stories. Things that pack a punch and things I can do fun illustrations for because that sounds really rewarding. I'm going to try to keep track of my writing ideas better this year and maybe the following format will work for it! Time will tell <3

Ordinary

ingredients: An Empath, a fashion designer's daughter, and an internet friend

description: Allie is someone who just wants to live a good life, but her powers mean she's forced to deal with things far outside her purview. She can feel emotions and sometimes that means she needs to stop things before the malintented people do the harm they're looking to do. She's also deeply alone save for a single internet friend and longs for physical companionship and the kind of life where she can get lunch with someone.

status: it would be a fun graphic novel! I do want to get in there but it's not my top priority

Bad Dreams

ingredients: silent hill, tarot magic, myth as truth, unreliable protagonist, "we had bad dreams the night [she] rolled in," "jenny calls from montana. She's only passing through. Probably never see her again in this life, I guess. Not sure what I'm gonna do."

description: This is a story about Sarah Shaw, a woman based on TMG Jenny who always comes into people's lives like a force of nature. She is a storm chaser, but the storm she chases is a supernatural phenomenon that destroys (consumes) cities. She is more or less in an eternal war with the storm.

status: unfinished, but I'm interested in revisiting it! I derailed myself heavily with trying to design the tarot cards (in the first few weeks of starting to draw)

Obscura

ingredients: litrpg levels and skills, a kind of ready player one sense of secret hunting, heists, lesbians, ghosts, and a kind of found family

description: Prometheus, Theo to her friends, is the sole survivor of a job gone wrong and seeks a revenge that burns hot and bright. Her heist brings her an item she's never heard of and it turns out to give a new skill to the person who reads it. Things spiral rapidly until she finds herself with a crew set on an impossible prophecy.

status: I do want to have this finished, but it's in the fridge at the moment. Off the burner and in storage.

Startide 4 aka Spent Gladiator

ingredients: ghosts, psychopomps, [redacted], "do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive," "just stay alive/just stay alive," persona

description: Harbor, an exhausted, anxious trans girl, moves to a new city for a fresh start. She is immediately given a vision and offered a choice to have powers in exchange for helping to save a city. In over her head, she meets Bee and her entire band and must figure out both how to be the person she wants and what being a psychopomp entails at the same time.

status: actively working on it!

Current Mood: bouncy
Current Location: at my desk
Current Music: transcendental youth

I didn't have many major thoughts about The Bear seasons 1 and 2. I came to it in a space where I deeply wanted to see what it had to offer mechanically; a restaurant grown from the ground up over the course of a show.

This aspect was the major thing compelling me, so much so that I skipped season 1 because the second season is where a lot of the major changes hit (mechanically). Eventually, once I hit the end, I went back and watched the first season. However, this experience more or less broke my holistic understanding of the show.

Season 3 repaired it and also gave me an understanding of what the show wanted.

It's always been a show about the weight of a dream and how much you can counterbalance the economic realities of the world and your own personal traumas by leveraging your diligence like some sort of gameshow where, if you just manage to hold still in the right position long enough, you'll win the grand prize.

In this season the realities of that diligence began to become clear. We open with Carmy's determination in the past to get through a truly traumatic, abusive superior to earn the skills we see him exhibit. In present day, he creates a list of non-negotiables that he believes are necessities to get the restaurant a Michelin Star.

To follow the arc of the previous seasons, this would end with the restaurant getting a star. Instead, what follows is a very close study of what feels like a single week in real-time. (In actuality, it's maybe a month or two.) Everything is closely knit together, episodes often beginning where the last one ended. And instead of seeing the forward progress of The Bear, we see everyone spinning their wheels against demands that seem impossible to meet.

The season culminates in the closing of an iconic restaurant that the main cast is tied to one way or another. They host a funeral dinner, invite only, showcasing many series favorites, all of them in the industry. Several peers at Syd and Carmy's table discuss their inspirations and the things that drive them forward. Their horror stories are intercut with prior scenes from the show and some great facial acting for Syd and Carmy as Carmy also looks at the abusive chef, seated one table over.

This moment illuminates several things, the primary of which being community. Carmy was brought up in a kitchen where he was isolated by this larger than life superior chef and his constant torment. Because of this, he was unable to make meaningful connections to the people around him as he was pushed to grow from "good" to "excellent" as his old teacher eventually puts it during a confrontation.

This underscores the world sketched by the others at the table who speak of having each other's backs, of being cultivated by their mentors, of having their passions nurtured and their general welfare cared for by the world around them.

Meanwhile, Syd's flashbacks speak to a world where she was brought up by a flawed man she deeply admired who could only teach her the world he knew. His teachings were about diligence and perfection and, while he never intended to be rude or cruel, of course an uninvestigated cycle of isolation will perpetuate itself. Throughout the season, Syd is being poached by a chef trying to start his own restaurant while simultaneously dealing with Carmy trying to give her partial ownership of the Bear.

The first episode ends by showing us that Carmy's act of rebellion, sending out a dish he designed as an allergy substitute in the past, landed directly on Syd's table on the day she came to eat at the restaurant. She stares at it longingly and takes a photo of it as a literal tree stands behind her as if growing out of her, a seed planted.

And the passing of mechanical skill is not enough. Syd spends the season starving for recognition and care, burdened by a head chef whose relentless pursuit of perfection shuts her out. She doesn't receive the same malice he did, but the indifference hits all the same.

Meanwhile, the season and final episode are also cut together with Tina and Marcus showing remarkable growth. They are not under the full tutelage and responsibility of Carmy, in his kitchen but not his proteges. And so they get to exist inspired and pushed, but grasped by a peerage that Syd does not have access to (her position and responsibilities isolating her further).

The management and mismanagement of dreams is the focal point of this entire season. And, as many post-covid shows seem to have realized, people cannot exist in vacuums. They require community. A dream is not something that is kept aloft by one person. That person will eventually break under the strain of it. And try as they might to chase before time runs out, time passes anyway, indifferent.

There's an interview with Brennan Lee Mulligan by Hank Green where Brennan says that college isn't intended to function the same way that all the compulsory education functions; getting excellent grades only gets you in the door and very rarely do people want his GPA. Instead, he posited that college is about making connections to people, about meeting people in your field and impressing them so that one day they might look to you when they start something.

This is a very narrow perspective, considering he's describing what led to a career in comedy. However, I do think that something similar could be applied to work in general. The connections you make to people who are also passionate about your passions in your career choice are vital.

People need one another. No one survives for very long in a vacuum. This has always been a show about needing people, about connection, about the families both found and blood, complicated and easygoing, nourishing and harmful.

I discussed this all with song and initially that was enough. I felt like I had satisfied my desire to think and talk about this season. But since then I've seen a lot of people disparaging season 3, calling it boring and pointless, dull and plotless. And I get that on some level. It's an entire season about interiority. It's a season about spinning your wheels. About how you can only push so far on your own before you run out of road.

But it's so necessary to any greater success. To see the characters not accomplish their goals, to doubt each other, to have no space to talk, to fail to investigate how they feel because they were always so busy with what they thought was important that they never addressed what actually was. If they had just succeeded or they hadn't faced an utter sludge of several weeks trying to execute on an impossible set of plans it would have felt cheap.

I, for one, am very excited to see what happens next.

And the wheel turns...

I've found myself very concerned with time lately. I always am in some regard; I have a nasty habit of waking up in the middle of the night every other month, concerned with my mortality in a way that makes me sure there's a recurring dream I never remember. But recently it's been exacerbated by learning to draw, which is an interesting way to contrast an otherwise thrilling space.

I've been progressing steadily by leaps and bounds. You can see paintings I've done here. I'll include a few things I've been drawing lately down below. I've made significant progress in a short time and I am happy with it and proud of it.

It also makes me a little mournful of what I could've done a decade ago with a good teacher. I've always been interested in art, fascinated really. Seeing other people's art has always inspired me, but as I talked about in my last entry, I just couldn't find a foothold.

I work dilligently to try and live a life without regrets. I think regretting things is a great way to dull the present and desaturate the future. But this one's hard to shake. Imagining a world where I could've spent the last ten years making art and fanart, engaging in spaces that feel so small now by comparison. If I could have a webcomic by now, something I'm happy to look back at.

All of those are things I can do now. And I am, insofar as I can, working constantly to try and claim the space that I've always been envious of. But I just want to sprint towards that place. As if I can reclaim the years. And I know it's folly. I can feel it dull the present whenever I wish I could do it and look at what I'm doing now. Doing a webcomic is closer than it was a month ago and that's careful, dilligent progress I'm proud of. It's just frustrating when your hand doesn't produce what you want it to and I give myself time to be frustrated before I take a breath and enjoy the things I have made. Because I've made many things I am happy with. Here, let's see a few.

My first finished painting

Marilla from Anne with an E

A portrait of Ashly Burch that I knew I needed to paint when I saw the original

A self portrait for my art blog

A painting I did of this feeling in Dragon's Dogma 2

and now some drawings! I've been practicing drawing since these last paintings

That's been my March and April so far in terms of finished pieces. And I'm very proud of it. The pinned post on my art blog says I've been drawing since January 7th, 2024 and painting since February 24th, 2024 and I have to hold on to how much good work I've put into this. It'll keep getting better.

Okay, as for media and life updates!

I've been playing FF14 again with song and it's been giving me a lot of time to read, so!

I've read The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera, which had a fun premise and interesting world building as well as a main character I enjoyed overall, but the actual story being told was uneven and it never felt like it all came together until the end, which felt too late for me. I think a sequel would be interesting for all that it did come together eventually, but I gave this one three stars.

I've read Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh, which was a beautiful surprise. Starting in an awful, extremist child soldier training facility was a hell of a choice and having an upsetting and worrying protagonist was another, but the themes of this book and the places it wanted to go mixed with the actual strength to carry through and make it all sing made it a real gem. I wish I could pitch it better, but I think it would spoil the effect to give a more accurate description. I gave it five stars, if that helps. CW Suicidal Ideation, Suicide

I read My Heart is a Chainsaw just yesterday as of writing this! I adore Stephen Graham Jones. The Only Good Indians is a vital book for me. I'm Native and... This is a whole different post. I intend to reread it soon, so! I'll come back with thoughts then, promise. For now, My Heart is a Chainsaw was so much fun. I ADORE Jade Daniels, a 17 year old Native girl whose special interest is horror movies and who cannot stop thinking or talking about them or with them as her reference points speaks to the teenager I was. It was more comedy for me than horror, but I think she and I were very much alike and I just love her so much. Oh! I made fanart, actually!

I'm working on a painting as well, maybe a comic? We'll see! Follow my art blog to see posts as I finish them.

Anyway, My Heart is a Chainsaw was a lot of fun for me. CW Suicidal Ideation, Suicide Attempts, CSA, and then lot of general horror stuff

And today I just finished the first novella of the Greenhollow Duology, Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh. I just had to see what else she was writing since I was so taken by Some Desperate Glory. This was an interesting bit of folklore about what sticks after a few centuries of life and what you might change for. It was also just a very pretty, Queer book.

I think that Novels and Novellas (and short stories) should be judged by different criteria. Novels have time to sink roots into you, to make friends of strangers. Novellas have far less time to do so and can manage it, but it's a careful balance between plot and characterization and world building, all just built enough to create the effect. Stephen King calls short stories a kiss in the dark from a stranger (pos), which is very much how Silver in the Wood feels. Maybe the kiss in the dark and where they end up in a single arc.

I think Silver in the Wood is four stars for a novella, which is not derogatory, just a different thing.

Okay, I think this is just about as long as I want this to be, but it was fun to update!

Re: time, I've been desperately clawing at learning art these last few months, but I think I'm finally slowing into a more reasonable balance (2-4 hours a day, not 8+ like it seemed like I was on). So, perhaps I'll have more time to work on things like my Dreamwidth! We'll see. Until then.

The wheel turns...

Current Mood: artistic
Current Location: at my desk
Current Music: nothing actually

I meant to update this more frequently this year, but every format I try to keep up with ends up being difficult to keep up with, so we're gonna keep experimenting.

For today, however, I wanted to document some progress! I've been learning to draw! It's something that's always eluded me due to all the types of learning I've done before this having bounced off of my brain. This time I've been learning with Proko's Drawing Basics course and it's hit my brain in exactly the right way. I mean, there's 4-5 main sections and the first one is just Lines. Learning to draw differing line qualities, different exercises to practice, etc. And that is far more accessible to me than people just saying, "go get a notebook and draw a lot."

Like, draw what? The amount of humility this requires without further guidance is SO staggering. Because if you go out in nature and you try to draw, say, a park scene... what do you feel when you spend twenty, thirty minutes and then look down and you've basically made a child's drawing. What do you improve from there? Well... the trees look wrong. Okay, why? How? What's wrong about them? You can then go look up a tutorial about how to draw trees, but what if those skills don't apply elsewhere, even to other trees? Do you have to look up a tutorial every time for every part until your brain and hand can create, subliminally, a ruleset and knowledgebase for you to reference?

It just felt like so much disparate, uncoordinated pieces of information. On one side, intellectually, it always felt wrong to be reinventing the wheel when people have been drawing for millenia. On the other side, physically, I always felt discouraged about what I was able to synthesize and produce.

So to have some unifying theory from someone who's very experienced and who both starts at, "okay, here's three shapes of lines that'll be useful for your entire drawing career" and ALSO has a thoughtful order of projects so everything is always achievable has just done wonders for me. I've learned more in this last month than I have my entire life trying and bouncing off of it.

I mean, the whole reason I got into photography is because drawing was always so inaccessible to me. Don't get me wrong, I love photography. I love measuring the light and finding interesting compositions and playing with exposures, but I've never went a week in my life without wishing I could draw.

Below I'm going to show some of my progress through this month on some pieces I'm happiest with. It'll be chronological, so if you just wanna scroll quickly to see the effect, I think that'll work too.

My first drawing! I think more than anything this still life focused on shading is a great entry because it makes you feel like, "WAIT is that all drawing is? I can give a drawing a good shape and depth by following an extremely minimal guideline?" Which is SO much fun. I'm still proud of this little guy.

This was a DIFFICULT second drawing. I learned so much by drawing these boots from a photo reference, but man was it rough in there for the first hour. Still, what an effect!

My first fanart! This was fun for me because I was just sitting around and suddenly went, "WAIT I CAN DRAW THAT!" And then I picked up my pen and my tablet and just drew what I saw and it CAME OUT? Just really quick lines, quick shape sketching. It was the first time in my life I felt like I could just...draw for fun. Which is so huge for me.

These were REALLY fun for me. Armed with, "Huh, I can draw that" I went and looked at some fashion references and decided to just have fun. They took me awhile since I hadn't even learned proportions yet, but I really like how they came out.

A chicken from some simple shapes. I just like how she turned out! Look at her!

This is my first face portrait! This was a measuring exercise and there's a lot I'd go and redo given the inclination, but ultimately I don't think it's bad for a first time.

Having wanted to practice portraits again, I went and drew Kirby Howell-Baptiste and I like the way she came out! My measurements feel a lot better here.

And here's some figure drawing practice! This was SO much fun. They're just quick sketches meant to show the rhythm of the body but I really enjoyed making them. I think of all the practice I've done this weas my favorite to actually DO whereas my favorite to finish was probably a good portrait? I'd want to capture the model's faces and clothes though, because that's really fun for me.

And that'll conclude our time here! This is one month of drawing, 28 days. I think I've done a pretty good job!

P.S. Oh yeah, this is what I've been using to draw. I got a remarkable 2 last year for my birthday and it's great for taking notes but it's been WONDERFUL for drawing. IT's so nice to have this little e-ink tablet, especially now that I'm at a point where I'm drawing things for fun. Just being able to take it anywhere is soo fun.

Also I found this new image hosting site and it's been working out really nicely for me! Okay bye for real now!

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Location: in my new room!
Current Music: nothing actually

There'll be spoilers! Away! Run! Aaa!

I think ultimately I was both impressed by the way the show pulls off this deeply unreliable narrator and also really disappointed in the lack of hacking. Almost every piece of media about hacking either eventually makes the process shorthand enough that it's factored out to solve the quadratic. Whether it's any of the Watch Dogs games, hacker movies, wherever I go. It's just as important as set dressing. I feel like I'm being looked at the same way as a server at a Dennys would look at me if I said I wanted to have a pound of hash browns for a meal. It's balanced to be a side, something about the nutritional value, whatever the reasons it just feels like I'm being impractical.

And I understand this, fundamentally. I've written hackers before. Last year I was working on a novel with a hacker protagonist and it was constantly a struggle to imagine technology and then its subversion. Let alone Mr. Robot's desire to portray hacking accurately, which drastically increases the amount of research necessary to pull it off. It's difficult, it's time consuming. But mystery novels manage to create a facsimile of detective work and satisfy the reader's itch to solve crimes and I feel like there ought to be something similar here?

I appreciated Elliot's struggles this time around. Being inside of his perspective (more or less) made the transitions into unreality and delusion vital and the show did a really exceptional job of blurring the transition between those spaces. It never felt like plunging into a silent hill style otherworld, but rather that the delusions and reality were so solid that questioning anything required questioning everything. It was a really neat game.

It's just that towards the end of the season, I was no longer treated to explanations of hacking, no deep dives into what it looked like but rather montages, burning a CD, hitting execute, chatting in an IRC console window. And they discussed particulars but mostly as chaff, mostly as a backdrop to the greater, personal conflicts that were taking place.

I'm interested to know more about this show, but it failed to scratch the itch in my brain after the prison break episode. Likewise, no one interrogated the actual ramifications of the prison break except for the personal stakes? I mean he released a lot of prisoners. I would like to hear good or bad about that. Not pro-prison, but just... that was a hell of a way to cut the gordian knot, where's the rest of the fallout?

We'll see if I continue, though I'm glad I at least finally know what's going on in that first season.

Current Mood: disappointed
Current Location: at my desk
Current Music: nothing actually

The first time around I really couldn't care less about this show. Partially because the ex-friends who recommended it were very irritating about it and partially because I was just very over the sort of edgy societal takes it was offering.

Today I'm more amenable to its perspective and I'm really in the mood for hacker media for some reason. Plus, it's the end of the year and I'm quite listless, so having a project like, "get through a season of this show" is really beneficial.

Anyway, I won't be avoiding spoilers with these discussions, so browse at your own risk.

Episode 1: eps1.0_hellofriend.mov

Wait is that really the episode title? How long until we run out of filetypes? Are the filetypes important? Is that going to be some encoded, "the .mov files are dubiously real while the .mp4 files are pure fantasy and the .mkv files are pure reality" thing?

Okay, anyway I actually did enjoy this episode this time around. I think Elliot is interesting and I do remember having looked up things about this show when I DNF'd it last time, but it was so long ago that I actually forgot, which is adding an interesting perpendicular obsfucation to actually being able to tell what's real and fictional. The unreality is at the forefront of my mind at this point. It's fascinating to me the way Elliot struggles with unreality and also, at times, will school his own delusions into a form he finds suitable, like E Corp becoming Evil Corp such that we, the viewer, only hear people call it that aloud and see it written so everywhere. It's a really fun way to play with the structure.

My predictions are that Mr Robot isn't real. The way Darlene talks to him suggests he forgot something. It is meant to read as her telling him off before he knows what she's talking about, but what she SAYS sounds like she's been waiting, like he's discussed something with her and she's trying to follow up. It's incongruent with her just being bitchy. Plus the way that he complied with their request and then couldn't find them immediately after?

But I can't remember if I KNOW Mr Robot isn't real or not. I keep thinking I remember and then second guessing myself. Well. I guess we'll see!

Episode 2: Ones-and-zer0es.mpeg

I appreciate that his Very Clever System for not getting withdrawal (i.e. staving off addiction) from his morphine usage was only as infallible as his willpower. I mean, of course it was but all of his behavior in the first episode was unhinged, yet spoke to his dilligence and self-control, which were only (apparently) functions of a life in a very specific rhythm of boredom and loneliness. The moment it's thrown out of wack, the whole conceit falls down. Also, I think if you self-medicate any emotional symptom it will still get addictive with or without withdrawal symptoms. That's sort of the main criterion.

I also appreciate the way that the news about the FSociety demanding the release of the guy they setup is directly paired with Elliot wondering if he ruined a man's life for no reason. Which is to say, his doubts and the demands of the FSociety to undo this action happen near simultaneously. I'm sure it'll have some ulterior motive that changes the tone of the demand, but if Mr Robot IS a delusion and Elliot is running the FSociety, this would be a really fun detail.

OH WOW! Darlene talks as if Elliot knows things he doesn't know AND everyone deferred to Elliot when he walked into the arcade, gathering around him like he was in charge and Mr Robot literally inserts himself in between Elliot and Darlene to Talk About the Plan because why would he be talking to Elliot?

Fascinating. That feels like a Fight Club shot. Also, she's NOT looking at Mr Robot at all, she's just looking through him to Elliot. Okay, pretty sure that's not even a theory anymore.

Episode 3: eps1.2_d3bug.mkv

Keeping my "Mr Robot is Elliot" belief at the forefront, the whole pushing Elliot off of the railing thing is an interesting magic trick. There's been a lot of talk about hating yourself being a motivator juxtaposed really cleanly with the way Mr Robot says, "do you think maybe he was right [to push you out of a window at age eight]?"

We're involving a lot of touching, a lot of Mr Robot infiltrating Elliot's space, which is creating a lot of fascinating "evidence" in the same way that someone might deliberately go out of their way to forge an alibi immediately after committing a crime so they can have a bunch of people ready to say, "no they were here all night, nothing strange."

Conclusion:

Alright, as fun as this has been I think we'll call it there! It's getting a bit too time consuming to actually write all of these out and I feel like multitasking, so thank you for joining me! Maybe I'll do a write-up at the end of Season 1, who can say?

Edit, days later:

YES I DID, ELLIOT! From episode one. Well, I didn't know he was your dad and that Darlene was your sister, but I hit that called shot.

Current Location: at my desk
Current Music: the show that i'm watching

Against the Currant 52% Review

This book has been a welcome change of pace from Don't Let Her Stay. It's a bit melodramatic, but in a way that feels earnest even when we're rehashing information for the xth time.

Against the Currant is a first person POV about a woman and her family establishing her dream career, running an East Indian Bakery. As part of a proud immigrant family who has worked their asses off over the years, Lyndsay wants to not only share her family's cuisine but also her experience and love of her heritage through their cooking and baking.

A stormcloud rapidly rolls in, however, as she is thrown into a murder investigation on the day of the Grand Opening.

I'm torn between simultaneously wishing I could just stay in the bakery, listen to Lyndsay grow her brand in a slice-of-life story and knowing I would probably get quite full quite quickly. Nevertheless, the moments where I enjoy this book the most are the ones where we're getting information about a baked good or tea or anything related to the food and culture.

I do think it's fairly far-fetched to have Lyndsay decide that the answer to being a prime suspect is simply to go and investigate the real killer. It makes sense for a detective story with a hard-boiled P.I., the sort of gritty noir tale where the world is all out of fair shakes and you just have to clear your name, but Lydnsay is far from that sort of protagonist and far from that genre. Her brother is a very well-educated lawyer and he pulls his protege in to be Lyndsay's defense attorney. The issue is that whoever is setting her up is doing so with the express purpose of ruining her bakery, or so it would seem. And so if she waited around to go to trial and had all the negative publicity of having the trial out, she feels she will lose her bakery, into which she has invested everything.

I'm still enjoying being in here, but the conflict and her decisions about it do feel a bit contrived. Still, I'm looking forward to seeing how it all rises. I'd say right now I'm sitting at a 3/5.

Current Mood: lethargic
Current Location: at my desk
Current Music: nothing actually

This was an interesting experiment for me. Largely, I enjoy checking out highly rated lists on goodreads, seeing what people have been enjoying this year. This time I felt like branching out, so I took a dip into mystery and I thought Don't Let Her Stay looked fairly promising. Something about how dire the title was and the overall premise of a step-mother meeting her estranged step-daughter for the first time and there being a big Mystery sounded good for a quick, 4hr read (at 2.0 speed on audio book).

If you don't want spoilers, let me just say that I decided not to finish this book and look up the ending because it only dragged, but prickled as it did and I decided there was probably nothing it could offer me that would make the next two and a half hours worthwhile. In Video Game Review, this was once called Wolpaw's Law, the point where a thing can no longer be redeemed by its ending regardless of how high the quality is. (Think of it as the point at which the final can no longer salvage your grade.)

( Now, SPOILERS )

Current Mood: blah
Current Location: at my desk
Current Music: nothing actually

Over the Year of Our Devil 2023 I read Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, a book series cherished by people I love.

I immediately understood a few things, but it's only looking at the series wholecloth that I feel like I have a proper portrait. This is a remarkable feat, in truth; the whole series works in chain, not just as a linked narrative, but a linked understanding of the Baudelaire children and their development over time with each other's influence as well as those of the external factors (read: dangers) to which they're constantly exposed.

I'm going to be spoiling the whole series, so if you haven't read them I would suggest going to do so; they're very quick reads if you have a library card and want to listen to them at 2.0x speed, another suggestion of mine.

( A Series of Unfortunate Events Spoilers )

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Location: at my desk
Current Music: nothing actually

The Expanse is so dear to me. The movement of characters through their arcs and all the places they intersect are a fascinatingly clear network of the orchestration of vitals in a novel.

There are novel things in these books, portrayed in ways I find new and interesting. However, the vast majority of work that Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham do, writing together as James SA Corey, is what I consider the basic mechanics of writing.

To be clear, that is not a pejorative; I am an admirer and devout student of the basics in all things. I believe that a person can pursue the basics of a craft, sport, hobby, profession and, with dilligent pursuit, achieve nigh on anything. They're the first things many of us learn and also often considered the most boring parts to elevate.

In cooking, this is learning knife work by finding instruction on how to hold a blade, the best practices (keeping it sharp, the proper amount of pressure), learning different cuts and shapes and learning to gauge lengths of cut (cubed 1/4", julienned, etc) and then grabbing a bag of cheap onions or potatoes and teaching your body all the things your mind has just absorbed over and over again. It is the work of dozens of hours of refinement.

I did this when I was learning to cook. I do this when I start any endeavor. I never regret it. Learning the core basics of a skill is learning the skill, as far as I'm concerned.

Many people in writing are caught up in the unique, in the subversive, in the genre bending, mind-breaking, defiant, unable to be categorized works that disrupt the lives of readers and turn their understanding upside down. And yes, these can be marvelous both in the sense of spectacle and the awe that they inspire. I will not stand here and say that books like House of Leaves didn't fundamentally alter my personhood.

However, we must care about the works that can be defined, that can be categorized, the vast majority that fills genres merrily and proudly.

I will endeavor not to spoil the Expanse here in the illustration of my point, though if you would prefer to go in without any understanding whatsoever, I do believe it's time for us to part ways for a time.

( The Expanse Discussion )

Current Mood: loved
Current Location: at my desk
Current Music: a friend blend playlist

With the year drawing to a close I thought I'd take a moment to look back, as is custom.

In 2012 (I DID say look back), The Walking Dead Game Season 1 (TWDG S1) dropped. I was a couple of years out of high school and my ability to write regularly outshined the work of my peers. It was something I did brag about, but ultimately it really hampered me getting a lot of formal education on the craft and critical analysis. When you can bullshit better than your fellow bullshitters, no one pulls you aside to say, "hey by the way, this is how it's done."

And so I spent a lot of time thinking I was hot shit while simultaneously being unable to do anything but regurgitate the things I heard about work I enjoyed and plating it prettily.

And then I played the final episode of TWDG S1 and got really and truly shattered. I remember I started to cry and felt so overwhelmed I went and closed my bedroom door, despite being home alone, and just bawling. It was so sudden and complete that I searched voraciously for reasons. Other people cried, sure. Other people enjoyed the storytelling. But nothing felt sufficient in all the streams, videos, and different forum posts I tried to search.

I came to Giantbomb's podcast The Bombcast because the description mentioned talking about TWDG on the newest episode and I heard Patrick Klepek talk about the game and the way it ruined him. I don't remember the exact words and I'm sure returning to that moment now would be like seeing a haunted house in the daylight, but something about the way he and the others spoke caught in my mind and I sat down and listened.

I listened to over two hundred episodes (they had been going weekly for four years), over 400 hours of podcasts while I did something menial (grinding in FF14 or god knows what). It changed my brain chemistry. I modeled the way I thought about games after the way they talked. I still cared deeply about how they felt about games I cared about, but I was able to talk about them in ways that felt like filing more of the numbers off of someone else's work and, eventually, starting to think about what I wanted out of games. How did my opinion differ from Jeff Gerstmann's? From Vinny's? From Patrick's?

And then I started getting into their Game of the Year podcasts. Every November the whole cast got together in the studio and grinded out hours and hours of podcast. They discussed to completion which games every year deserved to be in categories like best music, best looking games, best styyyyyyle [sic], and ultimately the ranked Top 10 Giantbomb Game of the Year games. This was grueling. They all released during Christmas week, one 3-5 hour episode per day for five days while the site took a two week holiday over the holidays.

It was also a fascinating look into how Game of the Year deliberations are done at different sites. This was a protocol they took from their shared history at Gamespot, where they also did this yearly albeit unrecorded. It was the only time of year where differing editorial opinions went up against one another. Oh sure, there would be bouts throughout the year where someone would say a rude thing about a game someone else liked, but they agreed to go their separate ways after a few minutes typically. Here the conflict was the actual point. It helped me to get an understanding of how to push the parts of games that I loved forward, while also appreciating that they could be flawed and that sometimes exemplary elements were worth more than the sum of their parts or an average assessment of individual strengths.

I've come a long way since then. I don't know that I got a lot out of their Game of the Year discussions there at the end. They're still running, but all the old staff is now gone, no one there having been there longer than six years and most of them having been added in the last two. (I know this sounds like a long time and it IS, but you have to understand I listened to the four founding members of the site for 11 years, so having them all basically leave at once means that's not my ship of theseus anymore.) And this year I saw that they're holding their game of the year discussion live. That is to say, Live in a theater experience not just streamed on twitch. It's a lot. It's baffling and understandable considering the new era of Giantbomb is largely based on spectacle and audience engagement. It's clever to do and if the old staff had done it, I'd seriously consider going.

However, instead I'm left with a kind of nostalgia.

It's funny sometimes, isn't it? How much a little thing can change the scope of your life. All my friends know I care a lot about games. Many of them have heard me wax poetic about games I love and why. I'm a trusted opinion on games for many and that's just fascinating to me considering how much time I spent hearing other people talk about games. How little I spend doing that these days.

I'm also considering what I want to do for Game of the Year. I've played over 100 games this year. I do want to give some love to the things I've loved this year. It would be fun to do a video series, but I know how much work that takes and I have many things that I would like to do at the end of this year, so. It may just be a written exercise.

We'll see.

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Location: at my desk
Current Music: nothing actually

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Wind's Goings On

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52% Review: Against the Currant

Book Review: Don't Let Her Stay

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