There is a strange religiosity applied to the concept of family in US culture. I originally started writing “Midwestern US culture,” but most of the examples that come to mind aren’t confined to the Midwest. There’s an entire line of movies (The Fast and The Furious) that is all about the primacy of the family unit, though they tend to define family a bit more broadly than most. There’s entire cultural background covering the importance of The Family as it relates to organized crime. One of the most popular types of stories these days is about found family or the lengths to which one might go to return to family. Family, regardless of how it is defined, is seen as something worth everything and valuable beyond measure. What makes this somewhat more sinister and unpleasant, though, is the suggestion that anyone lacking family is a bad person. Villains are frequently loners. The philosophy of those we’re supposed to dislike is often depicted as favoring isolation and a lack of attachments. Hell, all you have to do is look at advertising and media around the parent-oriented holidays (Mother’s Day and Father’s Day) to see the subtle suggestion that choosing to ignore your biological parents, or otherwise hold the way they treated you against them, is a moral failing. It’s pervasive.
Continue readingMonth: August 2023
I Spy, With My Little Eye, Something Weighing On My Mind
I started watching Spy x Family recently. It’s a wonderful, warm show that I find positively delightful. I sincerely hope everything works out for everyone in the show. I’m also absolutely terrified that it won’t since I’m only a few episodes from the end of the show and there is still plenty of time for things to go bad. By the time this goes up, I’ll have watched the remainder of the show and had plenty of time to rue my optimism, scoff at my fear [this is the one I wound up doing], or spin my wheels pondering a cliffhanger. Normally, for a show with only one season that is such a joy to watch, I’d have watched my way through it in a few days, staying up later than I should in order to cram in a few extra episodes every day. Instead, I’ve been watching this for over a week because I’ve been careful to only watch a few episodes at a time.
I wish I could say I was savoring it, but the opposite is true. This show is actually emotionally difficult for me to watch, despite being so lovely. Not because I’m lonely and jealous of the budding family depicted on screen (the only thing akin to jealousy I feel is the broad and fun kind that grows from seeing something you like and wishing you were a part of it; a wistful “if only I could be a Pokémon Trainer/Jedi” kind of thing), but because this is a show about “family” and that’s a topic I have a difficult time engaging with these days.
Continue readingBurying Heart: The City Beneath Within The Ground Itself
I wound up going another session of my every-other-week Heart: The City Beneath campaign without playing Heart. We’re still in the throes of The Ground Itself and I regret nothing. I’m having a great time. Almost all of my players just so deeply understand what we’re doing that they’ve done half the moves I’d planned for myself, in terms of setting up the horrors of the world we’re going to play in. This means I’ve been able to focus on specifics and painting good images during my turns rather than introducing aspects of the world at large or adding to the tension of this downright awful bit of geography. I get to do things like talk, in detail, about a mysterious creature that emerged from a horrible sinkhole, described in stories as but a shadow on the horizon, that now wanders this world on some sort of mission that only it knows. Or describe how the dominant species (a froglike non-sentient creature that is incredibly long, flat, and known for hunting down everything in the area, including the people who used to live there) has been impacted by the force of decay called The Rot (which decays anything it touches/infests in every dimension and way, rather than being bound strictly to biological materials like we’re familiar with in meatspace) and how some of them have mushed together to form some kind of horrible beast that has been disappearing people for an unknown number of years. Or how a train, riding rails of limestone, bone, and metal over slowly dessicating dirt, emerged from the same pit that every horror has left behind in order to discorge its unknowable passengers upon the surface. It has been an absolute delight to play this game, even if it is, somewhat predictably, taking an incredibly long time to play.
Continue readingThe Next Jujutsu Kaisen Arc Is A Birthday Present For Me
At some point this year, I became aware of some new Jujutsu Kaisen episodes. Labeled “Season 2,” I was a little trepidatious about diving into a new season since the titles implied a bit of parallel story-telling rather than a direct continuation of the story that ended with Season 1. Eventually, though, I got over my trepidation, rewatched the entirety of season 1, and then watched the five episodes that exist of season 2. According to what I could find, more is going to start dropping on the thirty-first of this month, which is my birthday. It’s a lot more exciting to be focused on this upcoming release than it is on the unknown number of years it will be before the next bit of Demon Slayer comes out (since all we’ve got is pure conjecture at this point) and while the shows are incredibly different in theming and the episode-to-episode contents of their show, they’re both about slaying horrible monsters and bringing down the organization guiding the upper levels of those horribel monsters. I’m not really in-tune with anime trends enough to tell if this is an emerging trend (or it’s a dwindling one, considering how old Bleach is), but it does seem pretty funny to learn that two hit shows these days are both about slaying monstrous creatures that are varying degrees of intelligent and sapient.
Continue readingI Overextended Myself Once Again
I wound up staying up until about 2am Friday morning, since I only finished building my character and all that in Baldur’s Gate 3 at about 11:30 Thursday night. It took a long time to download and I had a D&D game I was playing in during the earlier hours of the evening, so I was faced with either going to bed without playing BG3 or staying up a bit to play just the intro. I chose the latter, which turned into playing for about two hours. That, plus a bit of research I did following my introduction to Gale is what informed last Friday’s post since I wrote that during work breaks in my morning and then finished it between chores Saturday morning. I was pretty busy for pretty much the entire day and evening, so I had to get pretty focused with my topic for Friday. It’s not like I had any extra time to play more or do more research about the game that day, nor have I had much since then.
Continue readingI Ran Out of Time, So Have A Parody Called “If I Had 1,000,000 Hours”
I didn’t have time to write anything for today (Monday’s blog post will be a pretty good explanation as to why), so I made a quick little parody of The Barenaked Ladies’ “If I Had A Million Dollars” (original lyrics and format provided by genuis.com). Feel free to hum it to yourself or just read my lyrics instead of the song’s while you listen to it. Or don’t. I’m not your boss. I’m just incredibly tired and decided I’d rather have something dumb in place than nothing. So please, enjoy this dumb parody I wrote of an incredibly basic song.
Continue readingBaldur’s Gate 3 Still Has Plenty Of Surprises After All That Early Access
I, like many other people, started diving into Baldur’s Gate 3 today. I’d already played a bunch while it was in Early Access, despite normally avoiding paying for games before they’re fully released and avoiding doing testing work that I’m not getting paid for (though, obviously, some exceptions apply since I’ve helped out friends with projects in the past). I actually bought it way back in early 2021, because there was a big media push for it and it was on sale. Or I had a coupon of some kind. Maybe a voucher? I don’t remember that period terribly well, on account of early 2021 including one of my worst insomnia boughts since high school, so I’m not sure how I got it for fifteen dollars, only that I’ve got a receipt that says I paid fifteen dollars plus tax for it. I remember thinking that it was probably not going to be that cheap at any time prior to a special sale the winter holiday period after it came out, so I might as well get it then and never play it. Then one of my friends also got it and we played it a bunch together. Not a whole lot, maybe twenty hours total, but enough that I was genuinely excited for the game’s release and fairly confident in my ability to zip through the early parts of the game after replaying them so many times with my friend.
Continue readingSpider-Man Is A Very Moving Game
I’ve spent the last week or so, ever since I finished Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, playing Spider-Man: Remastered on the PS5. I’ve already written about it a bit this week, as I rambled and ranted on about how I am finding less joy than ever in what used to be my favorite video game occupation: collectibles and collectible-based challenges. I even wrote about it back in 2018, during my initial run of daily blog posts (and I’m not linking anything that old to a current blog post), but I’ve only ever glossed over my favorite part of the game. I’ve mentioned it, but I don’t know that I’ve ever really talked about what draws me to Spider-Man games and Spider-Man in general. The latter is a bit more complex, though I can probably summarize it by outlining how much of myself I saw in Peter Parker and how much Peter Parker was always present whenever Spider-Man was on the screen or page. That, plus the enormous responsibility placed on this teenager’s shoulders, the grief that overwhelms and informs his early years as a superhero, and the fact that he is almost always fighting an uphill battle no matter what situation he finds himself in. A lot of reasons why I’d identify with this character as a kid and why the stories told through him might resonate with me. When it comes to the games, though, the answer is much more simple.
Continue readingI Miss Pretending To Be Someone Else
I’ve been so busy lately that I’ve hardly had the time or energy for doing anything after work other than settling down in front of my TV and not moving again until it’s time to go to bed. I had plans to start putting a puzzle together or maybe work on a Lego set at some point this week (in an effort to spend some time away from screens and take a break from books. The book break isn’t because they’re bad or they’re twisting my mind in some way (though doing a massive binge of The Dresden Files has definitely influenced my recent dreams, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post), but because I’m spending too much time hunched over things or folded up in chairs. I need some activities that let me sprawl. Or, I thought I’d need them since I planned to get a full week of daily workouts in this week. Instead, I’ve done zero workouts, stuggled to get to sleep on time, and all the energy I have for any given day has been consumed by work as I juggle projects, prepare for a company event (that has happened by the time this goes up), and attempts to sort through my feelings about a whole range of stuff.
Continue readingGrief Taken Nightmare Form Has Invaded My Dreams Of Late
I’ve had a weird and entirely discomforting thing happen a few times over the last couple months. While having fairly normal dreams (and the word “normal” is doing a lot of work here because I tend to either not remember my dreams, feel them so strongly that the emotions from them color my entire day, or have horrible nightmares), a cast of charactes from a past dream have invaded and changed the very nature of the dream they arrive in. You see, a few months back, in late April, I had a dream about defeating a horrible warlock. It was a pretty typical fantasy story dream, with a cast of adventurers on my team as we did stuff I don’t remember that eventually culminated in taking down an evil spellcaster who was trying to perform some kind of ritual that would give him some kind of ascendant power (I’m pretty sure it was immortality). This warlock had a crew of misfit-type underlings that we were mostly able to bypass as we went in for the kill. As I struck the head from this vile sorcerer, the mooks we’d bypassed swore undying revenge on me, specifically, but I woke up pretty much right after that so I didn’t think much of it.
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