Thanks to my last post, multiple people recommended Xenotilt to me. I indeed purchased Xenotilt at launch and had already played 3.5 hours of it. But for whatever reason, I just could not get into it at the time.
I owe Xenotilt a huge apology. It is a better game than Demon’s Tilt. There’s just so much more: more flippers; more player agency; also, a lot more chaos; more adversaries and visual clutter on the table; more movement; more strategy.
Most important, there are many, many more pathways, more tracks around the table, particularly leading out of the lowest playfield. In video pinball games it can be frustrating to get ‘trapped’ in the bottom field, circling the drain; in Xenotilt, there is almost always a surprising avenue upward. (Pinball class mobility?) There’s seemingly more U.X. generosity, more flipper-collision forgiveness, as well. Which is good!, because the table’s attacks on the little ball are a lot more aggressive this time around.
There’s even more ‘monstrous feminine’! I love the theming of the original Demon’s Tilt, pitting the player against Lilith, who is sort of the voice of the ghost in the machine; in Xenotilt, the player’s ball is explicitly trapped inside the belly of the she-beast. Terrific. (Everything—everything—reminds me of the Jonathan Lethem novella This Shape We’re In.)
My aging gaming laptop is finally plugged in and charging again (I need it for work). Do you know how long software updates take when your computer has been unplugged for a full year? It’s a while.
Under “favorites” in my Steam library, only four games are listed: Capcom Fighting Collection, Demon’s Tilt, Dredge, and World of Horror. Incidentally, these are the four games I can be counted on to immediately start playing after a year of computerlessness, and these are also all horror-themed games.
Well, it is always Halloween in my heart. A little over a year ago I claimed I would “never be able to enjoy horror again.” Since then I’ve come to accept that horror is just a part of life—albeit not the genre I’d personally choose to be trapped in full-time. Superficially I guess I look and sound exactly like I did one full year ago, with the same favorite movies and video games and belief systems as before, just deepened and weirdened. Well, they do say growth is in the shape of a spiral. Anyway, the games:
The Capcom Fighting Collection contains I think every Darkstalkers release? It contains five Darkstalkers arcade games, that’s what I’m saying—plus Super Puzzle Fighter II, which, despite not being a fighting game, is a Darkstalkers game. I've already written about my love for Darkstalkers in the context of the “fighter guardian” trope, but I can’t stop mentioning it, apparently.
Demon’s Tilt is a video-pinball homage to the beloved title Devil’s Crush for the Turbografx-16, but way more neon and laser-blooded. It’s probably my favorite game ever?
Unless Dredge is my favorite game ever. Steam says I’ve played it for 91 hours, and that’s not including the time I’ve played it on Nintendo Switch. Anyway, it’s the Lovecraftian fishing game. You play a fisherman with a beard; your avatar is basically a boat. I will never shut up about this game. I keep opening it to F.A.F.O. while trying (again) to complete my Fish-o-Pedia. They added a bunch of new fishies in the Iron Rig expansion, and I’ve been sweating it ever since.
World of Horror is lit. When we were in mandatory lockdown in early 2020, I just sat at the kitchen counter and played the dick off this. In a time that felt absolutely unreal—do you remember the constant cuts to an audience that wasn't there on the Masked Singer?—this game was the only thing in an incoherent world that made any sense to me. I bought it three times: once from itch.io for macOS, once on Steam, once on Nintendo Switch. For legal reasons the Junji Ito references had to be toned down in subsequent updates, but the game is still good. Steam says I’ve played it for 1100 hours, which cannot be right. One time I downloaded an “all of them” usermod pack and installed them simultaneously (“just fuck me up”), and this game was a straight nightmare—unplayable, unintelligible, masocore, and also beyond pornographic, which for me is just the worst possible combination of qualities. Enjoy!
I wrote most of this on September 25 or so, then took a surprise flight to Florida. Now I’m back! I’m back! I feel like this link roundup is unusually video-heavy.
Lofi Girl Halloween – beats to get chills to (video link) - The streaming-radio YouTube channel has returned with its seasonal playlist. Update: The livestream restarted/moved; as of September 30 it’s over here, lol.
Normal Man (video link) - Nick Lutsko is at it again, posting one new song a week all season long (this one apparently went live when Ted and I were both on airplanes). The song itself is about pregnancy body-horror movie tropes, but it's also about a beloved family movie classic.
“Fear Street”: R.L. Stine’s Gruesome ‘Cheerleaders’ Saga is Full of Evil and Spirit - It's that time of year again where all I wanna do is reread R.L. Stine's Cheerleaders Trilogy (which contains, at last count, five books). The first three books are maybe Stine's best work ever. Spoilers at the link; read only if you think you'll need some convincing.
The Qudelix-5K DAC is an inexpensive EQ tinkerer's dream - Wish I'd gotten this DAC in the first place!! I don't know anything about hifi audio, but my cheap in-ear Sennheisers must've had higher ✨impedance✨ than my over-ear headphones, because I destroyed my Belkin adapter after one night of watching YouTube. I replaced the dongle with an inscrutable FiiO DAC.
The Qudelix 5K, by comparison, is effortless to use. I plugged it in and confirmed it was working, then opened the corresponding app to adjust the audio and to choose an EQ preset. I picked the preset someone had already made for my model of headphones. Easy! Done!
It's the Autumn Equinox [at the time of writing, anyway], the day of the year when day and night are equal in length! From this point forward, at least here in the Northern hemisphere, the nights will be getting longer. (inserting an edit: I mean, they were already getting longer… oh my god, you know what I mean.)
This week's links are all about, in some way or another, striving for simplicity.
First off, you can pry my Palma from my cold stiff swollen hands and, second, you'd follow similar steps if you just wanted to dumbify your iPhone for distraction-free focus. You could try it!
Somewhat related, a lot of the kids these days are using obsolete iPhones in lieu of iPods: a 3.5mm audio jack means the device is its own DAC, no expensive dongle required. (Man, using a decent pair of headphones has become pointlessly complicated anymore — I now have three DACs and an mp3 player, two bluetooth dongles, and multiple headphone jack adapters for my Apple devices. I’m so over it.)
Adventure Games Promo is Here! – GOG is running a major sale, with new and old classics like Dredge, Blade Runner, and Sleeping Dogs, selling for next to nothing. For the Halloween season you might dip into any number of chilling old point-and-clicks, including Shadow of the Comet, Waxworks, Realms of the Haunting, the Elvira games, Harvester, or D. (If point-and-click adventures are not your bag, there are like a gajillion other GOG sales going.)
Five nights ago before bed, I played Alien for Atari Lynx, a 10-year-old homebrew port of the 1984 computer game. It got me thinking about Aliens Roguelike; I’d really like to play it again! But I couldn’t get the Mac version started on my MacBook, or the Linux versions started on my Steam Deck. Not even the Windows version would launch in Proton or Wine! God (or Weyland-Yutani) doesn’t want me to play it, I guess, but if you have a Windows machine sitting near you, it is a pretty freaky game.
Speaking of pretty freaky, Frontiers of the Mind (Windows only, for now) launched up just fine on my Steam Deck. I’m super into multimedia/Macromedia slideshow edutainment from the 1990s, so this presentation style was right up my alley. I toyed with the cursed software for a long time before looking up the British TV show “Knightmare” (video link), and how can this even be real. I left the show playing on my iPad Thursday and, as I was typing this sentence, I glanced up to see a child standing inside an animated undulating meat room (s1e4). Anyway, there’s some secret Easter Egg material in the game; Ted found the first two, while I have found nothing.
Today I installed Minesweeper and Poker Poker Magic on my Playdate. The latter is a Puyo-like falling-brick game, but it uses playing cards instead of color-matching as its primary mechanic (for obvious reasons).
I'm also very slowly downloading the Windows horror game Frontiers of the Mind on the strength of this write-up (via @juv3nal.bsky.social) and will try to install it on the Steam Deck using Lutris (I guess??). In other thrilling news, the new Analogue Pocket firmware came out today. I updated my device and was delighted to be alerted about an Atari Lynx core, finally ported from MiSTer! Hurrah!
I wrote this, about Cohost and for Cohost, in the aftermath of its cofounders’ amazing co-talk at XOXO 2024. Today I opened Cohost to learn that the platform’s future is in pretty explicit jeopardy. With the understanding that what I wrote there will likely fall into the sea and dissolve, I am reprinting it here.
So here’s something I was talking to the Cohost co-founders about a couple nights ago, because I think it’s kind of interesting: About a year ago I joined Spacehey, a revival of Myspace, because I still had all my old assets from 2007 and was excited to slap up a facsimile of my profile as it had last existed.
One of the first things I did as a Spacehey user was to take part of a day to figure out how to get music to loop and autoplay in the background. It wasn’t too hard to figure out, since pretty much all the info I needed about embedding was already well covered in Google's API documentation.
Satisfied, I posted the code snippet as a “layout” in the community blogs, where other users share their CSS and layout hacks. I wrote a little preface about the cultural importance and legacy of annoying visitors to your profile with background music they can’t turn off, then overexplained what a bunch of the different variables or class tags do.
I started watching the FX series ENGLISH TEACHER with my spouse yesterday. It's really good—at least as good as all the blurbs say—and I found that, speaking as someone who spent a number of formative years growing up in South Texas, the show really resonated with me.
The main character, Evan, played by series creator Brian Jordan Alvarez, lives in Austin while working at a high school in a nearby suburb (presumably Round Rock?). As the series opens, Evan is on teaching probation because of a complaint from a parent, subsequently going viral online and unwillingly becoming a polarizing figure as a result. As Evan, B.J.A. radiates a familiar, recognizable discomfort. His students razz him, which only adds to his discomfort—these young people tend to document everything on their smartphones, adding to Evan's all-consuming anxiety that he is under constant scrutiny, constantly being assessed—and he offers a genuine but maybe pinched smile when one student stays behind after class to reassure him that they're “on his side.”
One of his best work-friend peers, Coach Hillridge, is the kind of bro ally you'd have as a kid in high school: He affectionately nicknames Evan “Froot Loop,” which Evan lets him know is not okay, but later Hillridge jovially admits to threatening and bullying the parent who had complained at the top of the first episode—which is also not okay but, for Evan, is definitely a different kind of not-okay. (After taking Hillridge to task for his behavior, Evan sighs and thanks him.)
Hi, everyone!!! The Collider article’s title asks “what happened” and then doesn't tell us what happened. But don't worry! I can explain why the hit show EVIL was canceled (and I didn't even have to be a tv insider to figure it out)!
(I felt pretty goofy typing all this out, because it’s all stuff I assumeeveryoneknows. But maybe it’s not that obvious after all, “which would be by design,” my spouse suggested. —j)
THE APP WAS ALWAYS SHITTY
The streaming platform Paramount+ has a great catalogue. They know it, and I know it. The first time I signed up for Paramount+, my intention was to watch every vintage episode of MacGyver.
But from the jump, the standalone streaming app was a miserable experience for me, the end user: unstable, poorly supported, borked. At some point I angrily uninstalled the app and ragequit our subscription. I think I even left a salty review in the App Store and, judging by all the other salty reviews, my opinion was just one of consensus. (This is to say nothing of 'app fatigue'; who wants to install an individual app for every channel?)
REALIZING THEY HAD A HIT, PARAMOUNT DECIDED TO PUT THE SHOW WHERE AS FEW PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE WOULD EVER SEE IT
The first season of EVIL received buzz, acclaim, notoriety. It aired on 'network tv' (i.e. technically free to watch, if you still have an antenna). CBS, the network where EVIL's first season aired, is owned by Paramount. Because EVIL is so adored, Paramount made an abrupt decision to move the show (which AFAIK already had its second season in the can) to Paramount+. There, it would be a 'platform exclusive,' a dangling carrot luring fans into Paramount's walled garden.
And it worked! Sighing, aggravated, feeling spineless, I resubscribed to Paramount+ so I could keep streaming the very enjoyable show.
