I’ve spent weeks disgusted with myself for allowing my iPhone 13 Mini to force an upgrade from iOS 18.6 to iOS 26. I can’t even look at you anymore, phone! Last July the e-ink Mudita Kompakt phone started officially supporting sideloaded APKs, so when my iPhone gets too slow to function I will start to look in that direction.

“The whole point is that the new U.I. has pointless animations,” I’d explained to my best friend, of iOS 26. That’s the idea, to eat battery and memory and other resources. I hate to abandon my iPhone Mini so soon after I’d finally had its lemon of a battery replaced, but this is technological coercion: an abusive relationship, with diminishing returns for the consumer.

Speaking as a person with diagnosed ME/CFS (“chronic fatigue”), I’m extra offended by iOS’s new “Liquid Glass” veneer. At a certain point you’re just like, “Listen, this is the amount of battery I have to work with. I am performant when I’m not trying to do it all with extra flourishes. This additional cognitive load is silly.” I’m irked because iMessage is animated now, with text bubbles blooping into existence. Cool. It looks great. You can't turn it off. What the fuck? This doesn’t justify a bigger, hotter lithium battery.

Digital Rights Management

I was recently explaining to a Gen Z’er that it has become, by design, more and more difficult to strip D.R.M. from a Kindle purchase. In the era of digital media, it had really started with Apple successfully locking music purchases to iPods and iTunes. I explained the antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft, and I’d gone into detail: Bill Gates was one of the first people to have a smarthome himself. He’d envisioned, for the rest of us, a type of always-on, always-connected computer—really, a home server—and there wouldn’t be any meaningful difference between locally-stored files and remotely-stored files.

“That’s kind of what we have now?” the Gen Z’er asked me. “The cloud.”

“Exactly,” I said. So that had been Gates’s big idea, hence the blurring of the distinction between the G.U.I. ‘Windows Explorer’ and the web browser ‘Internet Explorer’. But a court of law had determined this was a violation of consumers’ free will, and that the end-user ought to be able to use Netscape Navigator if so desired.

“When you eliminate true choice,” I warned the twentysomething, “you end up with billionaires.”

Some billionaires are apparently hellbent on making the Apple iPhone the last luxury good. I mean, it was already a luxury good, but at the same time people do need phones. I’m already over it.

I don’t have the spending money for an overpriced e-ink Android, though, so I’ve been trying to make it work with my iPhone 13 Mini. I used Nugget to mostly reflatten/unslick my U.I.; then I fussed with Blank Spaces until I’d achieved a look I can live with. (There’s a constant, perceptible border on widgets now, and you can no longer ‘hide’ the dock using wallpaper tricks, so my launcher is still messier-looking than I’d like.)

My best friend thinks my launcher screen is unexpectedly pretty, with its dual competing background wallpapers—I couldn’t get the one wallpaper perfectly lined up, so the widgets are now backed by an entirely different wallpaper—and I agree with her assessment.

The Gen Z’er, conversely, stared at my home screen in confusion, remarked that it is “depressing” (“Desolate?” I suggested, and she nodded fervently), and then said something about worrying about my mental health. I laughed and promised her that I do like color, just not on my phone.

I guess winter can be tough on everyone. Right now, outside, the fields are blanched with hoarfrost, so that they match the opaque white sky. It looks like a big blank slate, which seems to really get under people’s skin sometimes.

User Friction

I have been struggling to recover the feeling of 2005 for myself; blessedly, I’ve enlisted allies in my battle against my smartphone. For Christmas I received an inexpensive digital audio player, the FiiO Snowsky Echo Mini, which replaces my much older FiiO. I also received a Garmin for the car, plus a Kodak PixPro C1 (I happily gave away my CampSnap to a nearby child). As always, I’m still running around with my old Game Boy Micro in my purse, but for the past couple of years I’ve used an EverDrive cartridge with it. Last year I replaced the Micro’s battery, so it is good to go for maybe another decade or so. Rounding out everything are a few e-readers (I have a problem): I am so close to escaping iOS and never looking back.

Another thing I was gifted was a gen 2 Original Tamagotchi. Eventually I returned to the store and picked up a contemporary Tamagotchi Paradise. This thing is great. It’s the ultimate fidget; you could really get away from your smartphone using something like this. It’s crammed with mini-games, but a lot of them are time/progress-gated, “like Animal Crossing,” I explained to my best friend, “preventing you from playing everything all in one day.” This is the kind of friction we need.

The whole concept of “positive” technological friction is so interesting to me. U.X. designers have mostly eliminated it in favor of slick glossy surfaces because people hate to feel like their precious time is being wasted. But time is a slippery thing! If you don’t have gates and dams and a lot of texture and grit—if you don’t intentionally create friction—then time slips off, and you glance up from Candy Crush (or whatever infinitely-scrolling dopamine drip you prefer) and you stare at the clock like “huh?”

With that, it’s almost time for me to post an EDC selfie to the r/dumbphones subreddit. Admittedly, posting a picture of an iPhone there is just begging for a dogpile (“this place is getting to be as bad as r/veganism,” someone recently commented, of the subreddit’s purity tests), but I’m very proud of how small all my devices are, including my vape.

“But Jenn, that’s still so unwieldy. That’s so much stuff to carry in a bag. All those tools are already available on your full-featured smartphone.” Sure.

But I remember lugging all this stuff around in 2005: the stuff that mattered to me. It mattered, so it occupied space in a physical way. (This thought relates to Julio Torres’s idea that more ‘important’ apps should have icons that grow larger and larger with continued use, or his subsequent suggestion that, once a smartphone is laden with apps, it could become physically heavier—that each app might have corresponding weight and heft. This is whimsical, but this is also U.X. design.)

“You can’t do the job if you don’t have the right tools,” my landlord said to me in 2005, in a charming Croatian accent. He was proud of me for bringing him a toolbox—but no need, because he’d already brought his own tools. (He also once told me, very benevolently, “My compliments for having the correct-size television.” Not too big, not too small, appropriate for the room. He was impressed with the way I’d nested in his beloved building and, more specifically, with the fact that all the furnishings in my apartment were scaled appropriately. I loved him.)

When every tool or instrument is frictionlessly available on a phone, your priorities, the things you value, get flattened: everything ends up mattering the same amount, which is to say, nothing matters.

This very sense of ‘flattening’ was pretty directly evoked by the 2024 iPad “Crush!” commercial, which sent people through the roof because it’d so clearly illustrated the feeling of turning everything into a stupid app. At the time, some marketing dude named Michael Miraflor tweeted that the Apple commercial “[a]chieves the opposite of their legendary 1984 spot. It’s not even that it’s boring or banal. It makes me feel… bad? Bummed out?”

Here Miraflor was attempting to articulate an ineffable sense of desolation, a blanched cultural doomscape, an icy Tartarus. Feels bad, man.

Link Roundup

Last year I wrote about how much I liked the browser Arc; I ended up ragequitting over some poorly-implemented A.I. features, however, and shortly thereafter Arc’s own developers bailed on the project themselves. I ended up going back to Vivaldi, and eventually back to Brave. (I talked about using the Chrome extension The RSS Aggregator with Brave here.)

Much more recently, my friend Jason was screensharing his web browser over FaceTime. “Is that Arc? Are you using Arc as your browser?” I asked them. Nope, it was Zen! I was astonished and delighted. Now I am using Zen full-time on my Mac. I imported my feeds to the Firefox extension Sage-Like, a nimble feedreader that works well with Zen (unlike Feedbro).

Here are some links, most of which I collected before Christmas. Hopefully you can still enjoy them in 2026:

• Wikipedia – Corrupted Blood incident: Something I did not know about until today (thanks, TikTok) was an accidental, simulated pandemic in World of Warcraft in 2005, when—after a boss battle—players’ animal companions could remain ‘infected’ by a debuff. Introducing these still-infected pets in densely-populated cities could spread the debuff, even to nearby NPCs; ‘catching’ the contagion would kill a maxxed player-character within 30 seconds. “Epidemiologists [...] took interest in how MMORPGs, unlike mathematical models, could capture individual human responses to disease outbreaks rather than generating assumptions about behavior.”
• Pajiba – The Cruelty Is the Best Part of ‘Beast Games,’ Actually: Let’s talk about game theory!!
• The Guardian – The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months: Here’s some happier news about human behavior. The Lord of the Flies is a book that messed me up as a teen; I have remained actively messed up by it, and I recently said so aloud. I lamented that, in times of crisis, if you try to impose any order, someone will sneak up and bonk you over the head. My best friend told me she had an article for me to read. Apparently, Rutger Bregman, the author of this book excerpt, was also disturbed by The Lord of the Flies. But instead of stalling out, as I had, he began to question William Golding’s nihilistic outlook. Bregman sought out and found the amazing true story of six Catholic school students who’d survived on a desert island for 15 months—and how they successfully, cooperatively accomplished it. “It’s time we told a different kind of story,” Bregman writes.
• Neal.fun – Size of Life via waxy.org links: A slideshow of living things, from smallest to biggest. “Each illustration was painted by hand and took five months to complete.” A handy “Compare to...” button lets you see scale illustrations side-by-side.
• WBUR Cognoscenti – Is the humble pigeon a mascot for our time?: I was thinking about this, too, just two nights ago as I drove under an overpass. It’s probably common knowledge by now that we domesticated pigeons for their utility and then abandoned them. “We became convinced they didn't belong,” writes Tove Danovich. But people everywhere are reevaluating the humble pigeon. File under “pizza rat.”
• Open Culture – “The Matilda Effect”: How Pioneering Women Scientists Have Been Written Out of Science History: Nice to know that the systematic discrediting and erasure of female scientists has a proper name, I guess? The fact that women’s contributions to humankind have to regularly be ‘excavated’ and ‘unearthed’ really drives home how and why a person can feel like a long-dead ghost of an ancient Babylonian well before they actually croak.
• Bloomberg – Meta Is Killing Off Its Only Good Virtual Reality App: I used to joke that the collective idea of V.R. was this dystopian nightmare vision of everyone braindead and drooling, either corpulent or withering away, jacked into the hypnomachine—and then it turned out that actually people enjoy dancing and punching and lunging their way to cardiovascular health. Even with a big clunky neck-breaking weight strapped to their heads!! Every platform dreams of having a killer app like Supernatural. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Leanne Pedante, I’d follow you to the ends of the Earth.
• BBC – Why do Gen Z have a growing appetite for retro tech?: The majority of people on the r/dumbphones subreddit are college students in their late teens or early twenties: that is, young people for whom it is imperative to recover focus. But also, young adults recognize things weren’t always like this, and their outright rejection of ‘the way things are’ is refreshing. It’s Liquid Glass all over again: we’ve lost control of our own devices, paralleling our very real lack of bodily and financial autonomy. Offline devices aren’t just about privacy or ‘opting out’; they’re about authoring your own destiny.
• 404 Media – Why I Quit Streaming and Got Back Into Cassettes: It isn’t just Gen Z.
• The Baffler – The World’s Memory of the World: I’m embarrassed to admit I've never played the video game Disco Elysium, but that is slated to change. “It also eases your way into Elysium using a hoary old video game trick: amnesia. Gaming is full of amnesiac player characters,” writes Gabriel Winslow-Yost, “because they offer a tidy solution to the problem of controlling a person who knows things the player doesn’t. If by some plot device the character has forgotten all those things, they have a reason to ask for information about the setting or even about themselves, and the player has more narrative leeway to define their personality.” Elsewhere, on my own personal blog, I recently wrote about the social deduction game Spyfall. When you’re cast as the ‘spy,’ you’ve effectively been thrust into a story with no clearly defined role or setting—you're lacking a script that everyone else has been equipped with—which might function as a serviceable analogy for being neurodivergent. There in that blog entry, I’d compared this feeling to that of being “an amnesiac protagonist”: disoriented, disenfranchised. What if that isn’t a weakness at all, but a strength?
• Current Affairs – Why Fascists Always Come for the Socialists First: “This anti-egalitarianism can assume a conservative form where those on the right seek to uphold existing hierarchical authorities they regard as, by and large, legitimate. But it can also assume revolutionary and even utopian forms, where the radical right will fantasize about restoring or creating utopian kinds of society where the true ‘organic’ hierarchy will express itself.”
• McSweeney’s Internet Tendency – An Open Letter to the Soft Millennial Man Facing Extinction: Stay tender, tender boy. We need you now more than ever.

Finally, here is one more link that I only saw (thanks again, TikTok) after hitting ‘publish’ on this here newsletter/blog entry. I’ve updated the blog to include it:

• NYMag’s The Cut – In 2026, We Are Friction-Maxxing: This piece veers a bit into finger-wagging—I know, I know, I’m one to talk—but it also functions as a clarion call. Everything around us is designed to steal our attention. That isn’t any individual’s fault, but maybe it’s time to take more drastic measures against it. The author talks a lot about “building up tolerance for ‘inconvenience’” in this piece. There’s a book called The Comfort Crisis which focuses on this very topic; I’ve never read it, but maybe the author of the linked piece did. I do think the books Dopamine Nation and Soberish are both pretty good reading when it comes to forgiving yourself for having a normal brain, even as they’re both about finding strategies to outwit said brain.

A Word

This newsletter/blog entry has gone on longer than most of my other updates—because I spent over a month writing it—so I’d like to leave you, dear reader, with a word of unsolicited advice. Maybe think of it as Drew Carey, echoing his predecessor Bob Barker, concluding each episode of Price Is Right by begging his viewers to spay and neuter their pets.

Here is my word of advice: Please fully dry your laundry.

To make a long story short, I wasn’t able to put away an enormous load of clean laundry, so I left it festering at the foot of my bed. Over the next few days I noticed a number of skin eruptions on my face and neck, which I eventually identified as hives. Then I uncovered the pile of clothing and realized it smelled rank. It had never fully dried! According to the Internet, that foul mildew odor is a product of the VOCs from mold spores. I learned this only after frantically gulping down Benadryl because my periorbital sockets and lips had swelled up. Now my bags of laundry and bedding (six! six trash bags!) are in the garage, and I am doing them one at a time, and the window is open in the dead of winter, and I have to completely disinfect my bedroom. Please fully dry your laundry.

Blessings, Jenn

writing • personal • fediverse • bsky

If April is the cruelest month, November might be the most contemplative. Today I played a little Solitaire, a little Snood, and several rounds of Shenzhen Solitaire, lost in thought.

I was finally firing up Kind Words: lofi chill beats to write to when a pop-up notified me that its sequel, Kind Words 2 (lofi city pop), had been released. I’d intended Kind Words 2 to be a day-one purchase, but time got away from me (it was released a little over a year ago, October 2024).

So I bought and installed Kind Words 2 at last, and I am very impressed with this sequel.

The original Kind Words, first released in the summer of 2019, is simple enough: your agender elven chibi avatar sits at a little writing desk in an isometric, box-shaped bedroom, like a dormitory room that kind of floats in the void of space. Lo-fi music plays in the background, riffing on the then-newish concept of “beats to relax/study to.” This idea of a dedicated, soothing virtual space for productivity or concentration has since appeared in standalone and web applications like Virtual Cottage and Spirit City: Lofi Sessions (for effective body doubling), as well as Flocus and Wonderspace. (Ghibli-pilled vaporwave cottagecore is the aesthetic of choice for tortured work-from-home university students, who tend to refer to this complicated audiovisual aesthetic as “aesthetic.”)

From the safety of isolation at your desk, you can anonymously reply to “Requests”—that is, anonymous notes seeking advice or support. Sending a ‘good’, helpful reply is only mildly incentivized: grateful recipients cannot continue the conversational exchange, but they can gift you a “sticker” in return. As your sticker sheet fills up, little decorative objets d’art—plushies or other collectible figurines—appear in your room.

On ‘down’ or ‘blue’ days I’ve never sent a request, but I’ve compulsively answered them. It’s a low-stakes way to feel useful, connected, without the investment or commitment of full-fledged friendship.

Sitting on a bench in Kind Words 2.

“Paper airplanes” also perpetually drift by, and you can click on one to unfold and read it. Paper planes are intended for transmitting one-off confessions or ‘deep thoughts’, but tend instead to contain adages or other general words of support.

It’s an issue that plagues the original Kind Words. The streams of both types of messages—both “requests” as well as “paper planes”—often become clogged with more frivolous or whimsical bids for human connection.

In a slump of boredom or numbness, people might tend to request recommendations for movies, books, TV shows, games, music. Or else they might post haiku, or issue a little plea to the universe. And jokes—people have jokes! There’s a “Report” button in the corner, but using it to flag off-topic posts feels absolutely insane.

A map of the city (Kind Words 2).

This glut of misfiled missives has been corrected in Kind Words’s sequel. Instead of fighting the way people gravitate toward using Kind Words, the developers created wholly new locations where these types of messages can be sent and received. Lately I’ve been thinking anew about the psychological architecture of virtual spaces; the developers have charted an entire emotional map.

Your save data from Kind Words—stickers, bedrooms, bedroom decor, plus previously-favorited paper airplanes—carries over to the sequel. The interior bedroom art is the same; music from the previous installment still plays in the background. Quite literally nothing has been lost.

The first image is Room 4 from Kind Words 2; the second image, for comparison, is from the original Kind Words, version 2023.09.10. I was checking to see if the “private journal” option were a new thing; it is.

This time, though, you can stand from your familiar writing desk and “Go Outside.” Doing this for the first time felt like the opposite of Labyrinth, when Jennifer Connelly opens her bedroom door onto a weird snowy void. Instead, your bedroom door opens onto a bustling main street. Exhilarating! (“It’s a social space with no followers, no likes, no subscribing,” according to Kind Words’s official website.)

Here, at “Home,” you will find other avatars waiting to “Chat.” Chats are anonymous and asynchronous, like a long-distance chess game of short conversation. Paper planes float past as before, can be uncrumpled and opened; sitting your avatar on a bench stares you up at the sky to read a constant feed of ephemeral paper plane thoughts.

Excavating your inner hipster inside Books & Stuff.

One door down from your brownstone is a clothing shop (for tweaking your avatar) and, beside it, “Books & Stuff,” a ‘vintage shop’ where you can either request recommendations (movies, games, music, currently a certain number of requests for queer vampire media) or flex your exceptional taste by replying. You can also send a paper plane by clicking on the streetside mailbox just outside.

Clicking on the nearby rail stop pulls up the city map, and here is where the magic really happens. From Home, you might naturally choose “Plaza” first. The train deposits you in a park, reminiscent of Wii Plaza, where you can eavesdrop on transcripts of already-completed player Chats. There’s also a hyperspecific bulletin board simply called “Cats!,” where you can either supply a description of a cat, or name the cat based on one of these descriptions, just like T.S. Eliot would do. (Gosh, he is really everywhere.) My cat recently passed away, so I could not look at this for very long.

The Plaza.

Then you might take the train over to “Outskirts.” Going into the Café seats you at an open mic, where you might choose to either “Listen” or “Share a Poem,” or else go into the “Poetry Challenges” submenu where you can answer a challenge or, alternatively, issue a writing prompt of your own. Clicking “Listen” sends a little stream of avatars onstage, performing anonymous users’ poems line by line. You might assume it’d all be angsty tripe, but I’ve already favorited a number of beautiful, wistful and/or life-affirming odes, so there.

Outside the Café there is a zen archway leading into a seemingly endless garden called the “Chain Forest.” In the original Kind Words, a lot of paper airplanes contained chain letters, which typically asked visitors to repeat the prompt along with their replies, and “pass it on!” Now chain letters are a place you can explore. And some of the chains are pretty fun! I thought this one was worth recording for posterity.

The Chain Forest.

Another destination is “Snow Mountain.” At the base of this little mountain is a hot spring where you can immerse yourself in others’ sage wisdom. (“Every day, once a day, give yourself a present,” someone recently submitted. I wonder how often this particular Dale Cooper quote turns up here.) After you’ve read three, you can leave your own lifehack, hot tip, or hard-won life lesson.

Just up the path from the spring is “Magic Echo.” I’m too scared to shout (type) anything into it, but here’s the official “Help” description:

You’ve found a strange and cavernous hole. There is no visible bottom.

If you yell into it, you will hear an echo, but not of your voice; you will hear the echo of the person before you.

And the next person will hear the echo of you! Each echo is only ever heard by one person.

At the very peak of the mountain is “Make a Wish,” where your perspective shifts so that you are gazing up at the nighttime arctic sky. Here, you can read others’ wishes for themselves—a constant tickertape of short prayers—and potentially type out a wish of your own.

Finally, there is “Last Stop.” This destination brings you to an empty parking lot. Hovering your cursor over an unmarked storefront indicates that it contains “Memories,” i.e. past favorites and other data that can be exported and browsed. The parking lot crumbles off into a watery expanse, which therein contains some sort of kawaii Lovecraftian blue god—with two eyes and an undulating open mouth—called the “Wiggling Void.” Here, you can type something that will instantly be deleted, which is just my style: tossin’ thoughts into the cosmic maw.

“Listen” invites the player to eavesdrop on short conversations, about 12 lines in length.

I think what strikes me most about Kind Words 2 is that it is a radical undertaking, a disproportionate labor of love, given that the original Kind Words—while rightly award-winning—was a $5 toy. This isn’t to say that the original Kind Words wasn’t expansive; on the contrary, Kind Words 2 simply considers and embraces the way users were naturally inclined to play with the original, building a whole geography around their instincts, mapping their emotional needs onto the terrain. It’s a compassionate feat of both community management as well as urban planning, which are surprisingly similar fields.

Didn’t T.S. Eliot write The Cocktail Party? God, that play wrecked me as a teenager. If John Donne claimed that “no man is an island” (“a piece of the continent, a part of the main”), Eliot was claiming that yeah, no, actually, every man is marooned on his own continent, and that’s the tragedy of contemporary society. There’s reams of literature, and also an entire branch of sociology, about how alienating cities are, and also disorienting, and both pick up right around the start of the Industrial Revolution. Anyway. Kind Words 2 bridges these disparate realities, traveling freely between varying states of connection by light rail.

Viewing a reel of paper-plane messages in Kind Words 2.

If I had to fashion an elevator pitch for Kind Words 2, I’d describe it as a mashup between Animal Crossing and the woefully underappreciated mixed-reality sleepytime application Pillow, which launched in November 2023. I guess that doesn’t carry much meaning, since very few people play every piece of software that comes out on a Meta headset, and even fewer put on their headsets right before bed. That’s a weird note to end on; now I’m scrounging around for a clincher of a final paragraph.

But I also don’t want to say exactly what I mean. I don’t want to revisit the thing I spent the latter half of the past month exhaustively writing about—which was, eerily enough, an academic postmortem of a collaborative build, from 2020, of a virtual community/theater metaverse city-island—and I definitely don’t want to talk about chronic illness, or the pandemic, or how we totally had the chance to change the way people digitally meet up and then, as a society, just didn’t.

I do think, often, about cozy virtual community spaces, which people regularly establish and then just as inevitably abandon, except for when they very rarely don’t. I’m still devastated about the loss of Glitch—the developer, Tiny Speck, dropped it to create Slack, a totally different kind of city—although a small team is attempting to revive it using the original assets. There’s also the ImagiNation revival. And there’s Uru Live, the community-maintained Myst MMO of old. And people are still active all over Telnet, which is nice. But these feel like ghost towns.

I guess I’m saying there’s something people keep trying to build, and we haven’t quite gotten there yet: maybe a walkable, accessible city full of third places, but inside the computer, allergen-free. Every time a virtual world tries for canniness—by which I mean a lifelike familiarity—now-conventional game mechanics like “foraging” and “crafting” always get in the way. I mean, I love those things, but I mostly login to FFXIV to stand around. Maybe there’s some MMO (with a companion novelty cookbook, I’d hope!) that I would feel more at home in. Kind Words 2 comes darn close. I don’t know. I don’t even like MMOs that much.

Instead of all that, I will just say that Kind Words 2 is a successful experiment in city planning, and a place well worth visiting on your day off.

Updating to add: You can find a marvelous and much more resonant review, written by somebody else, here.

Kind Words 2 is available for us$20 on Steam (PC, Linux, and macOS). Kind Words 1 is available for us$5 on Steam, itch.io, and Humble Bundle, although save data is (presumably) transferred exclusively through Steam Cloud.

writing • personal • fediverse • bsky

This info is from September, but it only just reached Celebitchy: A.I.-generated R&B vocalist Xania Monet has charted five times on Billboard, mostly thanks to ‘digital song sales’ (a milestone that can easily be gamed, supposing you have the funds—just sayin’). In an interview with CNN’s Victor Blackwell, Xania’s rep Romel Murphy explains that the human behind Xania, Telisha Nikki Jones, has “been a poet for years” and is singing her lyrics directly into Suno. (Create stunning original music for free in seconds, Suno’s website reads.) Her voice is tuned and augmented—or replaced completely—using plugins.

“Society has a norm for singers,” Murphy goes on to tell CNN. “Your voice has to be a certain type, your look has to be a certain type.”

This made me feel ill. I have empathy for Telisha (supposing she is a real person and not just Romel’s invention, functioning as another layer of security between himself and the rest of the world). I know I gave up acting because of my weight gain; people give up on their dreams all the time because they don't ‘look the part’. Sure! Showing up as yourself is the hardest, most radical thing!

I became friendly acquaintances with Laura Albert in 2006 after writing a lengthy Internet comment (lol) defending JT LeRoy—a defense I’m not sure I’d type out twice—and I also went to bat for Nicki Minaj soon after she was caught shaving two whole years off her age. (Onika Maraj plays the role of Nicki Minaj, I’d argued at the time.) Oh, well. Short-sighted as I may’ve been, this is the central theme behind Jem, Hannah Montana, Batman: we use alter egos, avatars, in order to feel bulletproof. Isn’t that armor necessary when you are commodifying yourself? To shield the authentic, mushy core from being consumed entirely?

Consider even just the proliferation of VTubing: Individuals are acutely aware that if they have a single perceptible flaw, they’ll be mobbed over it, deplatformed over it, especially if they are already femme-presenting in some ephemeral way. It feels like the A.I. apocalypse will be driven by human insecurity—the insecurity over not being the perfect commodity, the perfect product.

This constant striving for perfection feels unhinged. Not too long ago, a music-and-songwriting student—who is already primed to ‘make it’ because he’s awfully well-connected—was telling me he feels anxious and ill-equipped because he doesn't have a ‘good’ singing voice. I laughed. I said that people don’t trust a good singing voice, that a smooth, trained voice sounds corny and inauthentic.

It’s not so different from the inherently cheesy veneer of over-manufactured pop music, I added. It’s got to have a flaw to be trustworthy, credible. Even gen Z hipsters collect music on vinyl because the hisses and pops, crackling between the needle and the groove, impart an organic sense of warmth, like a campfire. We should all be making garage recordings and singing off-key.

I think the creepiest aspect of the Xania Monet story is, this is a media landscape already infected by autotune; T-Pain had to go on NPR’s Tiny Desk, then season one of The Masked Singer, just to prove to audiences he has real pipes. We already can’t tell genuine from fake. If other artists and musicians are already using A.I., there’s no guarantee we’d be able to tell. (“I fell for the bunnies on the trampoline,” I lamented to a Lyft driver recently. He made fun of me. “I think I just wanted them to be real,” I sighed.)

Murphy promises that, in time, Telisha Jones will reveal herself. In other words, “Xania” is effectively Sia Furler’s wig.

Who is this for? People who actually care about music tend to purchase through alternative platforms like Bandcamp, whereas Billboard uses metrics like iTunes and Amazon sales, or radio airtime. (Radio airtime? When practically every station is owned by iHeartMedia? What does airtime prove?) As it is now, a huge number of mainstream recording artists are manufactured by a label and then ‘gamed’ into visibility, leveraging bot activity and algorithms; it’s basically the “dead Internet theory” but for media, including pop music. How is a regular human musician supposed to compete? She isn’t.

The product isn’t intended for human consumption. The product, ultimately, is the metrics: to keep making line graphs for shareholder meetings, to keep moving money around. Uber, for one, has never turned a profit—the company just goes through round after round of V.C. funding, which feels like it should be a form of fraud—and I imagine this is how most ‘ghost industries’ work. Continually reinvesting in a dead-end product maintains the illusion of value. What the difference is between this and regular money laundering, I’m not sure.

I realize any alarmist writing about A.I. is moot; I could just type the phrase “ecological disaster” over and over, and be done. “But this is a different kind of ecological collapse,” I told my best friend, “and it’s the music industry.” (“Good!” she replied.)

We hadn’t been talking about A.I. or pop culture at all. Instead, my friend had been pulling up a photo of the UPS cargo plane that had crashed shortly after takeoff. She held up her phone; it was a photograph of just flames. I squinted and leaned closer. Yep, it sure was a picture of flames.

I asked if she’d heard about all the other flight delays. “The infrastructure is coming apart,” I muttered, “just like Steve Bannon always wanted. ‘Burn it all down.’” We looked at each other uneasily. Then I admitted I’d been trying to say something of substance about Xania Monet all day.

This isn’t the sort of thing I enjoy writing about! Unfortunately for me, I’m stuck in The Séance of Blake Manor. Stuck? How can you be stuck? Thanks; I amaze even myself.

Early on I ‘lost’ the game because I spent way too much time loafing around looking at everything—as I, an old-school adventure gamer, am liable to do. Really, I was FAFO’ing. Fine. I started the game over, this time making sure to look at absolutely nothing unless it were definitely important to look at. (Looking at stuff eats up time on the game’s clock, by the way.) Currently I have a handful of guests I am supposed to “confront” or otherwise “act upon,” but they’re all seemingly attending the same event in the Drawing Room and will therefore be indisposed for the next hour. I want to use my time wisely, but no one is around to “act upon.” So I’m stuck! Or rather, I’m at a loss as to what to do next—a sort of internal impasse. I will not be consulting a walkthrough.

writing • personal • fediverse • bsky

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.)

So why couldn’t I get into Xenotilt before now? I honestly have no idea. As best as I can figure, I was just already at full capacity. I could not have handled any “more.” In times like those, I guess, we look toward the comforting and familiar. Better the devil you know and all that.

Plus I think, in times of insecurity, we might have a tendency to gravitate toward things we are already good at, and I am not very good at Xenotilt. I don’t feel competent and in-control, which is an embarrassing reason to deny myself a more satisfying experience, but that’s exactly what I’d been doing.

Well! That phase has passed, so now I can enjoy Xenotilt as it is.

King’s Quest VIII may have been universally critically maligned, but it was the cat-hair mustache in Gabriel Knight III that bore the brunt of blame for the death of point-and-click adventure games. And I’ll admit I, personally, was always able to believe that’s when adventure games died, because that’s the exact puzzle I got stuck on in Gabriel Knight III, and internally I was like, whoa, maybe adventure games are dead for me. (Which is ridiculous, because Blade Runner and Grim Fandango came out around the same time, and those games were lit—but it’s true that Gabriel Knight III is probably the last Sierra game I ever received for Christmas.)

Unlike me, Dia Lacina was able to wrap her brain around the cat mustache puzzle—adding that she’s only sure she solved it because she distinctly remembers getting stuck on a later, entirely different puzzle. “[Y]ou can imagine my surprise,” she writes of recently replaying GK3, “when the cat mustache puzzle turned out to be one of the most fun and riotous moments I've had playing an adventure game.”

Read her retrospective of the game here:

• Endless Mode – The Death of Adventure Games: The Cat Mustache Was Never the Issue Here

Other links

• Futurism – Meta Stock Plummets as Investors Horrified at How Much Zuckerberg Is Spending on Misfired AI: An airport shuttle driver recently asked me something tangentially related to A.I., and I confidently replied that Meta’s erratic decision-making—over-investing in this basket and then shifting all the eggs to that basket—is reflective of the addled mindset of company leadership. (I didn’t say it, but I thought it: We’re talking about the guy who's building a bunker under Kaua’i.)
• NYMag’s The Cut – The Truth About IFS, the Therapy That Can Break You: Yeah. Internal Family Systems is great, I love it, but I’m so not shocked by these horror stories. The personality gets disintegrated before it becomes reintegrated, and that can go very poorly—particularly for a psyche already under stress. (Even the book title ‘No Bad Parts’ neglects the fact that maybe there are bad parts, ha ha, or at least very destructive parts, and only shame is keeping those parts on a leash.) Anyway, the article describes the phenomenon of false or unreliable “repressed memories” akin to those that defined Satanic Ritual Abuse, which directly led to decades of Satanic moral panic.
• Laughing Squid – Thomas Dolby Explains How He Wrote His Enduring 1982 Hit ‘She Blinded Me With Science’: I linked to this a couple days ago on social media, but I’m posting it again here. For a variety of reasons we didn’t really celebrate Halloween this year, but I did watch the music video 7 or 8 times this week. I have complicated feelings about the video—visually, lyrically, thematically—but I also unabashedly love it. It’s just one of those things.

writing • personal • fediverse • bsky

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!

Oh, drat, I completely forgot: I haven’t played it yet, but a friend who did a little side-work on The Séance of Blake Manor told me to download it immediately, because it is for Jenn and so Jenn-coded. I was very flattered to be told this, because it has been receiving good reviews, and it’s just nice to be thought of. The last game I played with any degree of obsession or intensity was probably The Case of the Golden Idol and its similarly-titled sequel, so Blake Manor will be right up my alley, allegedly. The last game I played a year ago, after someone had strongly urged me to do so, was Slay the Princess. These are all horror games for horror season, which have all come out in the past five years.

Moving right along: I recently returned to the browser Brave, but I often find myself missing Vivaldi’s built-in RSS feedreader. Presumably I still pay for Feedly but, if so, I really can’t afford it, and the old broken feeds, which I’ve been dragging around with me for almost two decades, are a scrambled mess by now. Finally I installed a Chrome extension called the RSS Aggregator, which does the same job as Vivaldi’s tool for the same price of zero dollars.

I then visited each of the websites I’d once used Vivaldi to keep up with, snagging the feed URL from each. Every site had at least one interesting article on its front page, so here are today’s links:

• Endless Mode – Five Horror Games That Need To Be Re-Released: It’s really irritating that a bunch of horror classics are inaccessible unless you have a Playstation 1 through 3 plugged in and sitting around. Which is why I’m basically always looking around for my little PS TV, which was a Roku-type dongle that could play some, but not all, of the Vita’s catalogue. I have a lot of PSX-era horror games digitally-downloaded to that little guy, and boy do they all look crappy. Like, crappier than before.
• Boing Boing – Your brain is addicted to stories — and it's killing your reality: This is the next subject I’d been planning to blog about, but now it’s likely that I’ll put that draft on hold in order to read a whole book about it first.
• The Marginalian – Perfect Mind: The Gnostic Field Guide to Wholeness and Hearing the Voice of Truth: Currently there is a major, asynchronous-but-widespread effort to recover documentation of women’s writing that was erased by warring Christian factions (I’m simultaneously reading Femina and When God Was a Woman), and it feels like everything has to do with figuring out which sky god to pray to and which one to kill. You’d be forgiven for wanting to fight God bareknuckled these days.
• Open Culture – Meet the Forgotten Female Artist Behind the World’s Most Popular Tarot Deck (1909): In keeping with the theme of the last entry, there has also been a big push over the past several years to pay due respect to Pamela Colman-Smith—people have taken to calling the Rider-Waite Tarot the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, which is a mouthful, but an accurate mouthful—since she had as much to do with the contemporary Tarot deck as Arthur Waite does.
• Laughing Squid – How Mythological Monsters Define the Boundaries Between Good and Evil: “Unfortunately, monsters are not always mythological. There are those who blame those they consider ‘others’ for their own faults or for the ills of society, thus perpetuating the monstrous cycle of hate.” As the 13-year olds around me would say, “let's go!”
• Futurism – Research Paper Finds That Top AI Systems Are Developing a “Survival Drive”: I mean, this is not a shock. There is a recognizable difference between the words “alive” and “sentient.”
• The Markup – How Do I Prepare My Phone for a Protest? You might need this!
• Phil Gyford – My First Months in Cyberspace (via Waxy.org Links Archives): We are now old, and slightly older people are now dinosaurs. I miss Eudora so much. I feel like you can only get that shit on Linux now (I like Claws).
• It’s Nice That – The thing that wouldn’t die: why Gothic endures in visual culture: The Gothic aesthetic! It’s not just fang-shaped chicken nuggies from Burger King!
• McSweeney’s Internet Tendency – I Started Reading Performatively, and Turns Out Books Are Pretty Good: You might’ve believed that reading was dead ever since video essays took over YouTube and your whole brain died during the pandemic. But TikTok’s aesthetic shelfie culture is still going strong, and that means book publishers will keep cranking them out, maybe. Oscar Wilde prints money!

writing • personal • fediverse • bsky

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!

I didn't even realize how badly I’d needed this. Now that I've switched to a monitor with a headphone jack all the way on the back (!), I was thinking about getting a usb-to-3.5mm adapter so I could plug my headphones into my laptop from way up here. Jenn, a headphones adapter? Aren't you describing a DAC? Oh my God I am. Anyway, plugging the Qudelix into my tiny usb hub lets me listen to 5K audio direct from my laptop. Bluetooth works well, too. I mean, it doesn't pass through my stucco walls; nothing does. But yeah, it works really well.

Is the ViewSonic 22” VX2267-MHD Good for Gaming? - My portable monitor was really tough on my eyeballs; it turns out refresh rate does matter! I have been toying with, for a long time now, the idea of switching to an e-ink monitor (don't @ me), but the price would be well beyond justifiable. I was also curious about transflective monitors for eyestrain; they use ambient lighting instead of a backlight... but my apartment is very dark, so maybe not.

Finally I just googled “monitors for eyestrain”; Popular Science recommended this one. Oh boy do I love a ViewSonic. This Paragon of Practicality plugs right into a Mac using a usb-c-to-DisplayPort cable (letting you watch Apple TV+ without getting the Blank Black Anti-Piracy screen — very important), and its refresh rate is 75hz. This monitor is so comfortable. It costs US$109, exact same price as the DAC I was just talking about. You aren't gonna find a ton of reviews on this budget Betty, so I am telling you right now, it's... more than fine. For the price, it is downright exceptional. You're gonna wanna buy a VIVO pneumatic arm for it, though, so just factor that in along with the overpriced DisplayPort cable you'll be buying. All in, still under 200 bucks. Make sure you leave enough clearance so you can spin the monitor around every single time you want to plug in your Steam Deck.

Take The ‘I Will Never Take Nintendo’s Side’ Vow

That’s the thing that gets me: They found the evilest angle for this. They found the thing that makes me side with Palworld, which I don’t want to do.

Consuming Halloween – “ALL ACTIONS STOP PLAYING / UPON THE HAT BE COVERED”

Companions of Xanth remastered soundtrack (YouTube playlist) – Oh my god??? Musician “Little Epic Tunes” decided to rework every song from the 1993 Legend point-and-click adventure game Companions of Xanth, starting with the first track and then just blasting through the whole game. What a profound labor of love — all for a computer game that is not particularly well-known or well-liked! I'm floored.

The Eye Screen's theme is a banger, and the Com-Pewter theme (which, in-game, I'd always muted) has become a work of smooth jazz genius. Actually, the entire last half of the soundtrack is super smooth. For a festive seasonal treat, check out my all-time favorite Legend game tune, “Inside the Gourd” (though I think I still prefer the original because of the “player piano” MIDI instrument).

Where does canned laughter come from – and where did it go? - Wow, I had forgotten how silly 1980s British laugh tracks were! These comedies are filmed on location in adorable little towns! Where even would the audience be sitting?

This reminds me of how terrifying the U.S. version of The Masked Singer was during Covid lockdown. Instead of sensibly shutting down like every other production with a studio audience, the show continued to film — splicing together audience reactions from earlier seasons. I found the concept of a ghost audience to be so unpleasantly uncanny (and so weirdly condescending) that it gave me a panic attack: would we never have a live audience again? And, well, the rest is history. (I have a habit of cutting myself short, to avoid launching into a fresh five paragraphs.)

How a bunch of art school grads made putrid, brilliant horror adventure Sanitarium - This isn’t my favorite point-and-click adventure game by a long shot, but it is really… distinctive.

writing • personal • fediverse • bsky

Marko Blažević, Unsplash

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.

• Using an Old Phone as an E-Reader: A More Secure and Flexible Device than a Palma

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.)

• what’s in your bag ? pt. IV (2005 – 2011) (slideshow)

@indiesleaze is an Instagram account glorying in the halcyon days of millennial hipster dirtbags on unprescribed stimulants. But some things really were better then, and it has to do with the not-yet-widespread adoption of the smartphone. Back then, posting on Twitter was hard, and that's how we liked it. It was supposed to be effortful to tell everyone with a phone that you were headed straight from work to the bar. Anyway. I don't know about you, but the inside of my purse — which I no longer “unpack” at the end of the day — is starting to look like the insides of these purses, and that's called progress.

• Screen time is rising and it's ruining us

I periodically go back to reread this CNet article. I've included it here to make a point.

• Where loneliness can lead

What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.

• I turned my house into the 1987 TMNT lair. (Reddit slideshow)

Reddit user Lingonkart is brilliant. Disney or Universal (or Efteling??) should hire them.

LTTP but I hate how much I am enjoying the web browser Arc.

Arc's big UI difference is its side panel where bookmarks live. I imported all of my bookmarks from Vivaldi in one nice, tidy folder, then set about reorganizing them. About a half an hour later, I created a top bookmark folder in Arc called “to-do,” and then I bookmarked all the tabs that have been piling up in Vivaldi for the past month. (I will miss Vivaldi's side panel, though, which is presumably for productivity apps like Todoist and TickTick, but which let me endlessly read RSS feeds and scroll through bluesky and instagram instead.)

I don't think Arc would have clicked with me if I hadn't also started using Notion last month, which has been especially useful for managing my open tabs. What the browser really does is alleviate tab anxiety. It's great like Spark is great: There's nothing wrong with a “classic view,” but all the open tabs and unread emails are gonna be psychically bringing you down.

But it's also bad in the same way Spark is bad: A.I. tries to anticipate what you'll want to name your bookmarks and downloads. If you're bulk-downloading your past Humble purchases, as I was, you'll end up with a mangled mess of files — exactly what Arc purports to prevent. No, Arc! Bad Arc!

Time will tell whether I pack up and return to my true love Vivaldi; for now, it’s a really great browser if you write drafts in a browser.

writing • personal • fediverse • bsky

Burnout pumpkin by Colton Sturgeon via Unsplash

• The History—and Surprisingly Dark Theories—Behind 'Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater' – “Eeper Weeper, chimney sweeper...”
• 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.)

* Planting a Digital Garden (via) – I recently set up a bearblog because I would like to have a personal space set pretty far apart from my writing portfolio. In the past I had always mushed all that stuff together, having long been fascinated by the fine, fine line between public and private, but in this modern era of “parasocial relationships” and reality TV—and after a lot of reconsidering my own boundaries—I am striving to be more intentional and conscientious about what goes where. Anyway, I really liked what this person had to say about planting and tending to a digital garden, and they are describing what I think resonated about Tumblr. I had... like, 9 concurrent tumblogs, I think, so clearly there was something I enjoyed about tending to each little space. * Josh Johnson Has Become the Funniest Guy on the Internet. That Is Not a Joke – “My comedy is a relationship between me and the people that come to the show. Posting to social [platforms] is my relation to people who I hope will come to a show one day and who I think will enjoy these jokes. When I’m done with a joke, why not share it?” I read this entire interview in his voice. His comedy strikes me as… very Buddhist, very ‘let’s not rush to a judgment and let’s just unpack this.’ * The 7 types of rest that every person needs (via) – I have had a lot of difficulty obtaining these types of rest, and I’ve also experienced a lot of burnout. And now I have a new way to think about this. I do need a lot of physical rest because of what I've read is inefficient oxygen transport on a cellular level. But I also need a lot of social and emotional rest; lately I've been trying to be strict with myself about who I spend time with. (Later, when I googled “7 types of rest,” I saw that a writer at Psychology Today had concluded their article by suggesting there is another type, an eighth. They didn't explicitly call it “bowel rest,” but it was bowel rest.)

writing • personal • fediverse • bsky

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.

Over the weekend I played Darklands until I hit a weird copy-protection snag, and then I moved on to Dark Heart of Uukrul. Both RPGs had the exact vibes I was looking for at that moment—you know, just, like, more mysterious fantastical things to click on.

I got Ted a lavender Game Boy Micro, which is beautiful and lustrous, and we set up the Everdrive Mini together. It’s a great lil flash cart. I used to use an EZ Flash cartridge with my Micro, but it drained the battery worryingly fast, so I cannot recommend. I really love my own Micro; I've been lugging mine around (off and on) in the same Pelican case since 2005. And I am back to carrying it around again since, for the past six months, I’ve been trying to not even look at my iPhone.

more snaps here

On Friday the 13th K and I visited the Velaslavasay Panorama, which was an absolute inspiration and also seemed very haunted to me, and then we went to see Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which felt like neither of those things. (I could write miles on what I disliked about it; the movie shares Betelgeuse’s seeming obsession with who plans to get married to whom, like a whacked-out Jane Austen novel.) Later, N, K, and I watched I Saw the TV Glow, which was haunting and inspirational and I want to rewatch it again (and again—I should have bought it but, instead, made the mistake of renting).

On Saturday I watched Halloween (2018) for the first time. It’s good! Did you know Danny McBride co-wrote this? You can tell on lines like “You don’t have to cry about it!” No, the teen actor doesn’t actually sound like Kenny Powers when he says this, but Kenny Powers for sure haunts this hardworking sequel.

On Sunday J took me to Smorgasburg. I was glad I’ve already tried Chimmelier; if I hadn’t, it would’ve been all I ate on Sunday. So I stayed away from Chimmelier, and we had the best nachos of our lives from Cena Vegan. I gushed “it looks like a nacho banana split!” when I saw the nacho boat. Later I still could not shut up about the nachos, which I thought were luxe. “Three perfect scoops of guacamole on top! Really? For little ol’ me? Guacamole is expensive! A fresh, ripe avocado? They usually have to travel...” This made my friend laugh, and they explained that I’d stumbled into matching the cadence and intonation of Jessica Wild’s viral moment (video link). I now feel very emotionally connected to a beloved star.

I’ve been writing the quick descriptions for Ted’s Tarot deck, and one card that brought me to a screeching halt early on was The Hierophant. I once attended an entire daylong workshop for this one card. For now I’ve written that the card “represents the traditions or conventions in which you were immersed as a youngster, back when conformity was necessary for your survival. This card invites you to honor the parts that were useful and to leave the rest behind.” I put this short description into “placeholder text.” But then I thought I actually liked it, so I moved it into “final version.” But then I was less certain, so I moved it back into drafts/placeholders.

I am really at odds with this card. How much do I want to hype up conformism? Someone-I-know constantly forms their own communities, and then self-isolates or moves on because they still haven’t found their perfect-fit family, and I am trying to think of what the Hierophant should say to that person. “The Hierophant makes figuring out who you are very confusing down the road”??

Something I keep thinking about is how frequently people have tried to recreate the vibe of the titular Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon series of books. I think the Legend game probably gets the environment right—it’s supposed to be an Irish-American pub, right?—but it’s been rebuilt over and over: as an old-school Second Life community, as a telnet channel…. People really congregate over the concept of “place” and “community,” even (or especially) online. I’m terrified of groups of people, but I do like being slumped near them. I’m still working out what “community” means for me, why I’m so scared of being in them, and how I can contribute to them without… contributing to them. Hmm, I’ll bring this up with my therapist.

Here are some other things:

Too many loners, not enough joiners ⋆ Oh.

Quantifying the Debate ⋆ The “They.”

‘Right to Repair for Your Body’: The Rise of DIY, Pirated Medicine ⋆ Contemporary witches.

Lenox’s Iconic Spice Village Is Back—At Its Original 1989 Prices ⋆ Capitalizing on the zillennial enthusiasm for affordable domestic whimsy and cottagecore, dishware manufacturer Lenox has notably brought back its ceramic “spice village.”

Voidblazers ⋆ Nick here says that the Playdate shmup was “worth the wait,” and I’m gaga for Galaga/Galaxian/Gun-Nac/Tyrian, so this will probably be the next game I check out.

“It’s a Cult, and Walt’s the Messiah”: Meet the Couple Who Sued Disney Over Secretive Club 33 ⋆ You don’t have to feel bad for the Disney superfans who got unceremoniously expelled from Club 33; we can all be thankful, though, that they’re talking about it! (Tom Hanks did not respond to a request for comment.)

writing • personal • fediverse • bsky

cute anigif via Elioth Games

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!

Here are some other great links I saw today:

How to Monetize a Blog (via) I noticed the weird formatting on the word “become” in the first paragraph and could see where all this was headed, but it still managed to surprise, delight, and surpass expectations.

Spoopy, Not Spooky: The Intersections of Cozy Games and Horror (via) Ever since the latest Dredge expansion I am back to lazily trying to 100% the game (for a third time). I think a lot about the creepy-cozy intersection. “Cozy” games, for which I have a low tolerance, are sickly-sweet unless they are tinged with morbidity: To have hygge, we must have uhygge; to have the canny and familiar, we must have the unheimlich. Thomas Kinkade understood this, of all people.

Bully I'm glad we've all unanimously decided to start blogging again. Heather Havrilesky has apparently been taking inventory of her life, and she's going back to coffee.

Ask Polly: “I Can't Decide What I Truly Want!” Havrilesky again, this time with advice for the disoriented, displaced, and disenfranchised.

An Easy Guide to Tinned Fish I have a small pile-up of fish-in-tins I keep buying, but they never look appetizing to me—even though I actually already know they're delicious. I'm just never in a fish mood! So I did a quick internet search to get myself into a tinned fish mood. This worked.

The Coffee Klatch debate watch party (video) This is how I watched the debate tonight. At the outset, Sam Reich's dad acknowledged that this group watch was a way for us all to “get through this together,” which turned out to be true. There was supposed to be live fact-checking, too, but Reich mostly just said “Lies!” and “Wrong!”

How Cults Use Language to Control (video) A short, disturbing video I texted to my mother-in-law tonight, after mentioning that the former president spoke for nine minutes more than the current vice president did. Here, Dr. Erica Brozovsky describes, among other things, the “babble hypothesis.”

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