Happy days are here again
Ahh, it’s the most wonderful time of the year!
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!