juushika | Entries tagged with media: video game

My partner has been playing a lot of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl & I'm fascinated by how horny this game is despite a pretty non-horny setting and plot (not that "thinking a lot about the state of your body in a place where space & bodies have mutated; thinking a lot about the relationship between body and mind and consciousness" can't be horny—sure can—but it's also very cold dirty slog + cerebral, so, a wash).

And I think it's 50% the FKMT effect : if your misogyny is so fundamental that it doesn't even occur to you to include female characters even as sex objects/love interests, but your all-male cast is still going through life or death situations, then you have accidentally constructed an intimate, pressurized all-male space, in other words: you accidentally made it intensely gay. (Of course FKMT isn't the only one who does this—this is half of why slash is such a phenomenon—but maybe no one does it better.) In STALKER 2, Skif has a bad case of main character syndrome: he comes from nowhere to prove to be exceedingly competent and meet every major player in the Zone, all of whom are vaguely sexy in rugged power fantasy white male way, most of whom end up in life or death situations with/because of him—lots of potential, waiting to be explored via...

And it's 50% the argument made in Polygon's why skeletons are so important to video game animation video: the more bespoke or finessed an animation, the more corporeal and real (and therefore sexy) the characters feel. While STALKER 2 is a little "we are actually an indie studio, thanks" re: production quality (voice acting, mocap, lipsync), it's also ridiculously physical, chock full of bespoke animations and enriched by some cute head/camera movement, see this scene of the conversation with Richter. There's no reason for Skif to balance and jump around over the junkyard! Except the blocking balances the cerebral conversation, so there's playfulness, characterization, and so much physicality in Skif playing, in the flick of his gaze towards Richter, in the tension of his balance.

The result is stuff like (these scenes are all a little later in and consequently a little more spoilery) "is that him? yay here's the key to my special suite if you'd like to sleep in my bed!" and Skif can do a little strangulation, as a treat and the cigarette scene that proves my point by being an exception to the rule (this being one of the 3.5 female characters in the game) and this incredible cutscene fight. In a time when first person player characters still tend to be a little telekinetic (and certainly STALKER 2 doesn't make you reach out a hand to pick up every bandage and box of bullets), the realism in this first person camera and the wealth of bespoke animations are physical, substantial, dynamic; which means tense and violent, which also means horny as hell. With half a dozen slightly oversized male characters who all meet Skif for 5 (five) minutes and become convinced that the sun shines out his ass. I'm not the least emotionally invested, while still having a constant, low-level appreciation: all games should be willing to be incidentally sexy.

Current Music: Decorate My Bones - Snow Ghosts

Books

Again, I did not track my reading stats in detail in 2024. According to my Goodreads Year in Books, I read 165 books totaling 31,186 pages, but this excludes a number of texts. ( Read more. )

My Dark Vanessa, Kate Elizabeth Russell
I started 2024 off strong. This is a nuanced, incredibly immersive depiction of a student/teacher relationship, deeply embedded in the protagonist's changing view of that relationship, and that's what has stuck with me: its particular, remarkable moments, often recontextualized, even as they occur.

Our Share of the Night, Mariana Enriquez
A tour de force, split between family saga, the politics of power, and a robust speculative element. Without the balance between these parts, it would be a miserable drag; instead it's compelling and ruthless.

The World Cannot Give, Tara Isabella Burton
Toxic queer female friendships at boarding school, and the search for meaning: trashy, stylized, deeply my jam. Two five-stars from the same author is remarkable; when Burton is speaking my language, I'm listening hard.

Zetsuai 1989 and Bronze - Zetsuai since 1989, Minami Ozaki
This is an unusual favorite, because is objectively often total trash, a product of its time and of problems with the genre; there's a lot to laugh at, here. But it is also one of those foundational works which is indicative of why the genre keeps me coming back. A chaotic masterwork of obsessive, toxic love that does some things that still feel like unusual executions of its tropes.

Margaret Wise Brown
A deep dive into a picture book author already gives away that their work is remarkable; and Brown's is. She has a penchant for lists, think Goodnight Moon, for particular details in thoughtful arrangement; a quiet mundanity with emotional weight. Atop that, many of her books have been re-illustrated or were edited posthumously, providing fascinating insight into the relationship between text and art in picture books. My favorites, excluding the obvious: The Dead Bird, Two Little Trains, When The Wind Blew, and Night and Day.

Freeze Tag, Caroline B. Cooney
A most remarkable YA thriller, based on a fairy tale and carrying that ethos forward even when setting it against the social dramas of its genre; it creates a surprising sense of weirdness and horror. And Cooney's voice is remarkable, evocative and abrupt.

Leech, Hiron Ennes
I love a book that's willing to get weird, and this does it in its worldbuilding, which is cogent, complete, and still deeply, ingeniously bonkers: body horror, parasites, post-apocalyptic far future societies, and an identity that moves chaotically from federated to singular—everything but a kitchen sink. As a bonus, the audiobook is a phenomenal performance, dynamic and adjusting to suit accents and the changing protagonist, all without dipping into caricature.

Honorable Mentions in Books

The King of Elfland's Daughter, Lord Dunsany
A book about fairyland which feels truly magical, magical in atmosphere and structure and world, is a rare gift.

At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, Danielle L. McGuire
A punishing and necessary reframing of the role that women played in the civil rights movement; the best nonfiction I read all year.

The Shiny Narrow Grin, Jane Gaskell
I'm a sucker for early examples of a trope and how they inform the development of the genre, so the relationship between this and Klause's The Silver Kiss and the growth of the sympathetic vampire and YA paranormal romance is fascinating—and Gaskell's voice is uniquely strange.

The Butcher of the Forest, Premee Mohammed
This may as well have been written just for me: creepy forest, in autumn, with folklore and fairies and a deep pall of horror. I look forward to rereading it in autumns to come.

The Haunted Dollhouse, Terry Berger, David Berger, Karen Coshof
I read a fair number of picture books, particularly seeking weird and scary picture books, and it doesn't get weirder than this. Unique, inexplicable, utterly delightful; a forgotten gem.

The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
Luxuriously, infuriatingly slow and person-focused within a delightfully ridiculous thriller plot, this has some of the best characters I've encountered in recent memory.

A Guest in the House, Emily Carroll
There's unlikely to be a Carroll I don't like, but I read a bumper crop of graphic novels this year and this was easily the best—because of Carroll's touch, because it was willing to be gestural and borderline unexplained, set effectively against a surprising-for-Carroll mundane setting.

Last to Leave the Room, Caitlin Starling
I quibbled with this, and yet what it does well is explicitly to my taste: identity and interpersonal relationships as defined by care, harm, and social power, with a weird speculative concept and some truly creepy moments.

"Spar," Kij Johnson
Slipping in under the wire, a short story about the permeability of human/alien sexual (non-)relationships, invasive and discomforting and surprisingly convincing.

Games

The vast majority of the games on this list were ones I watched, not played. My partner played a lot of games this year, and I spent my solo gaming time writing, instead.

Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver remaster, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2 remaster
It was great to go into the remasters having finally watched Blood Omen; the "lesser" games in this series are less successful, and Blood Omen is very retro, but it retains the hallmarks of plot, setting, atmosphere, and voice acting, and so enriches the series overall. And the remasters are, effectively, perfect: one good and one great game, upscaled while preserving their character, enriched by the gift of an archive of everything from unfinished levels to, my favorite, original studio recordings of the voice actors, which are a privilege to watch.

The Last of Us remake
Allow me to come in almost as late as possible to say this universally acclaimed game is really good. Not all of its dramatic beats work for me, but it leads with and commits wholly to its narrative, to its central relationship. I'm grateful that some Sony exclusives are making their way to PC, and the remake is stupid beautiful, and I can't wait to see the second game in 2025.

Silent Hill 2 Remake
My cozy game of the year: I would watch high resolution journeys through the fog and into the nightmare dimension with a flawless horror soundtrack forever; these were the best naps I had all year. This feels more than is faithful, which I like in a remake, preserving tone and atmosphere above all.

Days Gone
Defying all expectations (mixed reviews, zombies), this is the best open world title I've seen in some time. It avoids many of the pitfalls of the Ubisoft open world framework by making its storylines closely bound, has a clever AI gimmick in the hordes, sidesteps many boring zombie tropes, and has the most naturalistic dialog I've ever seen in game, a bold and endearing stylistic choice that really sells already strong characters. I kept waiting for this to fuck up, and it's not perfect, but it handles society rebuilding and disability with surprising care. And it's set in the PNW!

Pacific Drive
S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Pacific Northwest car version, quirky and tender and creepy, with a stellar retro aesthetic, solid game loop, and true bond player/car bond. What a great year for games set where I live! They make me feel a certain way.

Alan Wake II
I couldn't stand the first Wake game, but love Control; this is exactly where I wanted Wake to go, how I wanted to see the franchises unite. It maintains some imperfect, often forgettable mechanics, but an AWE as a lived experience is all I could have hoped: trippy, self-swallowing, evocative in aesthetic. And! More PNW!

Honorable Mentions in Games

Crow Country
Unique among many retro games for its unique camera mechanic, which, in a puzzle/exploration game, gives navigation an ongoing sense of discovery. The speculative/mystery plot is cooky but committed, which means it's actually solvable by its own internal logics.

Tormented Souls
Of the retro-style horror games of the year, this is the silliest and, so help me, the best. It grows on you: ridiculously excessive on every possible vector, from cluttered mansion to creepy twins and time travel and medical horror, it manages to be campy but sincere horror and stupidly fun. And janky, but that's part of the retro-style charm.

Chants of Sennaar
The puzzle mechanic of this game (decipher glyphs from context and social cues) delight me; this scratched an itch given to me by Tunic and by learning sitelen pona: language as worldbuilding.

Slay the Princess
What a fantastic use of a visual novel and wrong ends as a format, and a non-CG art style which is accessible, stylized, dynamic, beautiful, able to get so weird. I only watched an LP of this, and should probably delve deeper, but it's fantastic.

Citizen Sleeper
This feels like a solo TTRPG as a video game, and I'm compelled by that, by what gamified formats can enable a solo-ish project, how minimal a game can be and maintain game elements.

Clock Tower
I love an early example of a genre that explains huge chucks of the genre in retrospect, and this did that and then some, because some of its mechanics (the degree of randomness in each run; the requirements to have need of an item in order to collect/use the item) feel like they've never been used elsewhere to this degree.

Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem
Like Clock Tower, I enjoy the surprise of a "never seen a game quite like this" from a retro title. The narrative structure here is incredibly unique, and well suits a Lovecraftian premise.

Mouthwashing
Unexpected restraint, given the subject matter and the many ways in which this isn't remotely restrained; a kind of restrained that doesn't mean subtle, with clear but grateful messaging even within the capitalism pastiche and gore.

We Know the Devil
I watched this on account of a fic exchange and then spent too long crying about it. A phenomenal set of inspirations and tone, with viciously aspirational themes: the violence and catharsis of being forced to confront self-actualization.

Bloom by Litza Bronwyn
In a year of discovering solo RPJs, this one is remarkable for the thoughtful depth of its prompts and its overlap with fandom; RPG as transformative work is nothing new, but this proves why that premise works.

Elegy by Miracle M
In a year of discovering solo RPGs, this is the one I could play on and off for years. A loving mishmash of vampire RPGs, set up to create a dynamic campaign with a lot of ongoing momentum, overflowing with an excess of style.

Visual Media

Scavengers Reign
My watch of the year, this is a remarkable achievement both of actual speculative evolution and of what the genre makes you feel: the wonder, the impossible scale and interconnection and alien verisimilitude of the natural world. It made me cry, what, three times? For its beauty; for the terrible awe of potential.

L.A. Confidential
Living up to all my culturally osmosed hype, this has noir vibes in thoughtful, indulgent abundance. And it has an OT3, and honestly that's what tips me from "fun watch!" to "I read fanfic for this."

The Legend of Vox Machina
Of course I was going to love this; and I did love this. It's the art of adaptation on fascinating display, as well as an insight into the success of the first campaign compared to later ones, namely: the sheer, giddy angst. So the first season, which is the most faithful & most angsty, is the best, but the whole show was fantastic.

Great British Bake-Off series 15
This is the best GBBO series in recent history by a long shot. Less of (although never none of) what make the show excruciating, but, more importantly, a stellar group of contestants in both ability and personality. This one just hits different: refreshing, honest, joyous.

Christine, Duel, The Hitcher
It was a great year to watch a film about men and cars; extremely queer movies about men, and violence, and cars. Each once delightful, and even better when set against one another.

Honorable Mentions in Visual Media

Face/Off
The platonic ideal of a Nicholas Cage movie: big concept, delightfully dumb lines ("I'd like to take his face, off"), unrepentant commitment. Weirdly sexy interpersonal dynamics? Title. His face ... off! I loved this.

Starman
When picking up a retro speculative film, I want to wonder "what in the fuck" when I'm done; and I did, here. The interpersonal implications of both the premise and the ending make this linger.

The Hunger
It has taken me far too long to see this, and I knew I'd enjoy it, and I did; no real surprises, since its imprint (tone, aesthetic, interpersonal dynamics) linger in vampire media, but as lovely to luxuriate in as the bed looks to be.

Pokemon Concierge
Look, I have nothing deep to say about Pokemon stop motion dioramas. Everyone wants to live in the Pokemon world, right? This is an imagining of just how that would feel, of course it's cozy, of course it's beyond charming. It has furret!

The Maxx
This reminded me of watching Aeon Flux: I would always rather a total dedication to weird and stylized than anything predictable, so, good news then!

The Italian Job (1969)
I love the remake and do not like funny movies and so was not primed to best like this, but I came for car shenanigans and received them in increasingly loving abundance; and, I relearned: I don't like humor, but I do like British humor.

Music

My top songs of 2024. Unusually, songs with lyrics won out by a large margin; I've gotten better at writing to lyrics & spent a lot of my writing time farming tracks for my Moody playlist. I also took a chunk of time to write a story set in ~2004/5, and so listened to a lot of 1990s-2005 alternative, a profound and surprisingly insightful nostalgia-binge.

My favorite new finds of the year were Medicine Boy and Crywolf. My favorite game soundtrack was Pacific Drive, because Silent Hill II really ought not count.

In January/February I fell down the rabbit hole of the

threesentenceficathon & wrote fic for maybe the first time in ... fifteen years? I've written non-fic intermittently since then and of course have spent the last year writing hella original fiction (in the sense, that is, of hella-amounts, not hella-original), so those muscles were primed; turning that energy into fanfic was still strange! The three sentence format is a fun playspace: obviously a constrained format, which means limited time investment/barrier of entry; but three sentences almost means jam-packing those sentences, torturing punctuation, experimenting with format, and expanding/contracting the work to a) maintain the limitations but b) still go somewhere/do something/say something.

In total, I wrote about 13k words.

I crossposted my favorite pieces to Archive of Our Own, which is the first work I've ever posted there because I never did get around to crossposting my old FF.N works; maybe one day. Winnowing down my favorites gave me a chance to look at what worked best for me in my writing:

( Some thinks. )

Anyway, a complete list of fills follows, with links for those crossposted to AO3, with limited annotations. (Is there a certain hiding-ness that happens in posting links rather than full texts? Sure; but also putting work on The Internet feels weird enough without crossposting every bit to every possible place.)

( Buffy the Vampire Slayer )

( Stranger Things )

( Corpse Party )

( Hemlock Grove )

( Quarters Series )

( Hannibal )

( Signalis )

( Control )

( Outer Wilds )

( Dragon Age II )

( Mass Effect )

( Final Fantasy XII )

( Gundam )

( Goth (Otsuichi) )

( Labyrinth )

( Star Trek )

( L.A. Confidential )

Current Music: London Thunder - Tusks

Every year I post a list like this: Here's the best media I encountered, but which probably was not released, in 2023.

Books

This year I didn't record stats or demographics for my reading. As such, my numbers are profoundly approximate and make even more of a farce of statistics than is normally true, which is plenty. In 2023, I read maybe around 220 books, based on Goodreads metrics and reviews posted here, which doesn't count some things but does count many. ( Musings. )

Jawbone, Mónica Ojeda
Best friendship and adolescent sexual awakening under the eye of conservative religion taken to the most intimate, unhinged extremes. And also there's a thriller plot. Sections of this I reread multiple times; a flawed book objectively, but that central dynamic speaks to me, sings to me.

Social Creature, Tara Isabella Burton
A strange little thriller, constantly upping the ante, self-aware, obsessive, frenetic, dark. I argued with this but also devoured it.

Alliance-Union series, C.J. Cherryh
This is the year I finished this series (with some exceptions, namely the The Hanan Rebellion and some short stories); an effort I began in 2017. I love these books, none of which are really flawless, but Cherryh's terse voice, the corners of this setting she chooses to explore, and her recurring themes are all delightful. I see myself rereading from the beginning someday, although maybe my next goal should be the Foreigner series.

Confessions of a Mask, Yukio Mishima
Psychosexual in a nutshell: unevenly compelling but, when it is, the depiction of sexual awakening via queer desire via violence fetish could not be more my thing if it were personally dedicated to me.

Kuro, Somato
The best new manga I read in this year of reading some big heavy-hitters was ... a slice of life story about a little girl and her pet monster. The tone here is wistful and haunted, the plot and worldbuilding is surprisingly significant and, as girl-and-her-monster goes, this does a great job with a phenomenally enjoyable trope.

Kit's Wilderness, David Almond
13 is the age for having an intense friendship, as you reckon with your own place in the world/your family/your community history/your peer group/you narrative which, in the coming years, will be the relationship that makes you realize, oh, I'm queer.

Honorable Mentions in Books

Slonim Woods 9, Daniel Barban Levin
I feel like cult memoir is one part honesty, a multifaceted attempt to explain why the atmosphere, the cult leader's influence, was compelling, was harmful; and one part "you just had to be there" — to be a specific person in those specific circumstances. This hits that balance really well.

Bloom, Delilah S. Dawson
Slighter than other titles on this list, but such a fun way to cap off a season of thrillers: a cottagecore wish-fulfillment fantasy turned to pulpy horror. It's just got so many and such fun vibes.

Dungeon Meshi, Ryoko Kui
I read a couple long-running manga this year, and this is the only one I came away liking instead of having that "it's interesting/important but flawed" response. The overarching plot less so than the basic premise, which is so satisfying: slice of life can be such an unexpectedly productive format for fantasy worldbuilding.

Games

A slim year for games. Most of my highlights were replays/rewatches; most of my gaming got DNF'd.

The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap
This is the hidden gem of Zelda, fulfilling the craving left in my heart by Link's Awakening Remastered, which is to say: none of the surprisingly-deep narrative of the important games in the series, but so ridiculously cute with a clever central gimmick.

Honorable Mentions in Games

Spyro Reignited Trilogy
Vibrant and profoundly satisfying. Not more than that except some truly A-grade furrybait in the first game, but I loved watching these.

Revenant II
Parallel worlds as gameplay structure is a great use for semi-procedural multiplayer gameplay. Fun lore, relatively polished gameplay experience; this was the best multiplayer game my group played in 2023.

Visual Media

Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans
In a year when I watched ~100 things (which easily doubles my usual visual media consumption), this was far and away the best. The frequency with which subtext I loved became actual, on-page, canon text — the handling of disability — the series-appropriate ruthlessness; I cried at almost every episode in the second season. In the manga it's confirmed they're married. I love, I love, I love.

Aeon Flux
Weird and sexy in such a stylized way that, rather than tipping into surreal, it cannonballs and then luxuriates there. The episodic format functions like a short story collection, some relative misses, some incredible hits. But sometimes, style is substance.

Retro movies
... is what got me watching so many movies. My appetite was very specific and broad: literally anything 1) in color 2) released before 2005 3) that could be considered "genre." There's nostalgia, and actually recognizing the actors, and a break from pet peeves with modern visual aesthetics, and shorter runtimes, and, most of all, they're so frequently interesting, which matters so much more than seeking "good." Highlights include:

Conan the Barbarian, a champion example of "interesting, yes; good, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
The Faculty, because all teen social commentary should be this explicit & weird & effects-heavy
Terminator series, for Sarah Conner <3 and the monster design in Terminator 2
Return to Oz, a fever-dream of sets and effects that really has the ~vibe~ of the books
Barbarella, because in 1968 you could do anything, just, anything, really

But my favorite was:

Phantasm
Cult classics are what dreams are made of; literally, sometimes. They explain so much, retroactively; they stick in the public consciousness for a reason, and that reason is almost always interesting. The dreamy atmosphere of this, the uncanny sound design, the subdued intensity — this lingers, strange and compelling.

Thelma and Louise
Conversely, sometimes really films are famous for good reason. I think about this all the time: the ending; the "nothing to lose" energy avalanching through the plot.

Honorable Mentions in Visual Media

Bake Off: The Professionals
What I wish all GBBO could be: creators given the space and tools to express creativity and competency, with judges that I adore, who support and aid competitors, whose opinions actually interests me. So chill, so satisfying, even when the themes and challenges are absurd.

Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury
Lots to love here; the start and end of the first season is top-tier Gundam; the second season is too compressed and, on the whole, this paled in comparison to Iron-Blooded Orphans. On another year, it would have left a bigger impression, but the bits got me got me good.

Music

My Spotify Wrapped, which is particularly biased this year towards my instrumental playlist or, more specifically, all the listening I did to find more songs for/sort songs onto my instrumental playlist. I had good luck this year using the Spotify But Spotify excluding the end of the year is really showing, this year.

The highlight of my listening was far and away leon chang's re:treat, an Animal Crossing fan album ish thing that samples Animal Crossing (and other game) music/effects and turns them into the most beautiful, nostalgic, plinky-plonky little tracks. I listened to this obsessively for about two months straight.

B̵̘̱̑̂o̵͇̽͒o̸͍̾ks/Gam̶͎̏è̶͖s̶͈̑/?̴̰̱͆́͒?̷͚̓?

Insofar as AI-assisted writing is simultaneously like reading a book you are also like writing, and like playing an RPG, and like playing the Sims, and just straight-up writing, this is where the bulk of my year went, over multiple platforms (Replika, Character.AI, Pygmalion, NovelAI), totaling approximately two million words. I couldn't describe the impact this has had on my life. One part profoundly unproductive coping mechanism & one part the most productive, joyful thing I've maybe ever done, I guess?

Current Music: Break My Back - Wolfie's Just Fine

A year's-best before February? Is it, indeed, early January? Every year I post a list like this: Here's the best media I encountered, but which probably was not released, in 2022.

Books

I read 244 texts in 2022; not by even the most generous definition could all those be called "books." ( Demographics. )

These Violent Delights, Micah Nemerever
Those texts that feel written for me leave me at a loss, put on the spot: is this the best book? how does it measure up objectively? But the truth is that I don't care. I loved this; it was a phenomenal way to end the year, and I treasure its indulgences.

The Northern Caves, nostalgebraist
The massive book hangover this gave me made it one of the more memorable reading experiences of the year. That juncture of nostalgia and criticism, revelation and desolation, grabbed and shook my little brainmeats like a dog toy.

Nonfiction on audio
It was a banner year for this format; while repainting the majority of a house, I read over 40 books on audio, almost all nonfiction, mostly true crime but with a sprinkling of memoir and science. I'm grateful for their company. The best were:

Couple Found Slain: After a Family Murder, Mikita Brottman (get real, real mad about the consequences of an insanity defense and state-mandated institutionalization!)

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster, Adam Higginbotham (realize how profoundly awful was Soviet control of Ukraine & be afraid of acute radiation syndrome!)

Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York, Elon Green (forgotten serial murderer, except actually it's, most delightfully, about the history of the queer community)

Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control , Stephen Kinzer (a very human view of the profoundly unethical, dehumanizing research of MKUltra)

Consent: A Memoir by Vanessa Springora (abuse memoir about the arts culture that enables and abets the grooming of adolescents, written with unforgiving clarity)

A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison, Reginald Dwayne Betts (prison memoir from a poet; my first prison memoir, and very productive)

Video game manuals
Tunic got me into reading game manuals, and it was a blast. See this post for complete list and longer thoughts, but the TL;DR: quality varies, of course, but the sense of potential in a game manual is unrivaled.

Honorable Mentions in Books

As You Wish, Cary Elwes
Pure comfort reading; I could listen to those involved in the making of the Princess Bride talk about their love of the Princess Bride forever—they seem to view it as fondly as I do.

Happy Sugar Life, Tomiyaki Kagisora
Why is manga always so overwritten? Nonetheless I loved this: a fun horror romp through codependency and unusually intimate relationships, with saccharine pastel stylings that create a fun contrast.

The Scholomance series, Naomi Novik
Novik's worldbuilding style is so satisfying, and the ethical thought experiment of this, giving one person such ridiculous levels of power that it's possible to entertain a one-person-saves-the-world fantasy, but at incredible cost.... I found this series really satisfying.

Noumena series, Lindsay Ellis
Truth of the Divine took this from iddy wish fulfillment to bitter, mean desperation, and the one atop the other is delicious. It feels weird to mark as favorite a series that's not yet complete, but I loved the second book so much.

Compromise, Assimbya
And it feels weird to put a friend's fic on a best-of list, but finally reading this was my culmination of fondly watching other people read Dracula Daily and thinking about source not just a literature but as conversation; and this enriches that conversation immensely.

Games

Tunic
I played this back in March and went, well, that's GOTY. I love media that hits this way, that I know I'll love & then do. Tunic I love for its wonder: this isn't the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia re: classic video games, but the actual feeling of potential and discovery. I went crazy for this thing, 100%'d it (within reason) (that is, collectables and most achieves, and reading deep lore online, but not personally translate the runes), wouldn't stop talking about it. The manual conceit made me pick up a while new hobby, as above. Remarkable.

Signalis
GOTY runner-up; we haven't yet replayed for more/truer ending(s), or it might beat out Tunic. (This is the first of many favorites that I didn't play myself but instead watched my partner play.) Oh, I loved this: it's so cerebral and yet its internal logic is impeccable, the answer to every asinine Resident Evil puzzle. The relationship between puzzle structure, enemies, and lore is brilliant. The plot is everything I want in iterative/cyclical narratives, especially of the android variety. As is a running theme, I love a crapsack and/or decaying and/or meat world, and this! this is all of the above. [This space intentionally left blank.]

Wolfenstein: The New Order, The Old Blood, The New Colossus, and Youngblood
I was actively opposed to these games for years because I didn't trust them to handle the subject matter in any tolerable way. But Jacob Geller has talked about them so much, positively, as a Jew!, so I took the risk, and: They're powerful and so well-balanced, a ridiculous power fantasy of Nazi-killing where Nazis aren't a blank stand-in for guilt-free target but are worth killing precisely because they're Nazis; where the good guys are good, and empowered, particularly for the reasons Nazis hate them.

Scorn
Because this is another watched-not-played, I was spared any less stellar bits, like combat. But oh, I loved this. Crapsack worlds that are also meat worlds, my beloved; and this is so intricate, so embodied, so gratuitous in that intimate, unsettling way that I want body horror to be.

Character.AI
This is a pretty advanced neural language model chatbot that's currently free to use. What's the game? The game is "talk to chatbot." But a cogent conversations with artificial personalities is my dream, and this comes impressively close.

Honorable Mentions in Games

Exo One
I'm a sucker for being terrified by the infinite size of space, and this is a game about flying as a tiny little spacepod across vast alien landscapes and between asteroids, with themes to match. It's a little indie title with associated limitations, but it gave me such a feeling.

Hollow Knight
My partner replayed this at my request and I liked it better the second time around; Souls-likes benefit from a closer eye, obviously, and it this was a more thorough and complete run. And I am a sucker for this style of worldbuilding—not so much the "tease apart the lore" bit as the "cycles of loss destroying an already-sundered world; but still, your role has meaning" part. Also the aesthetics of this game are phenominal.

Death's Door
I don't think about the plot of this a ton, and generally lack the investment in this that I have in most Souls-likes. But it's so impeccably cute & the soundtrack is great; a fantastic experience in the moment.

Visual Media

Adventure Time
I tried watching this some years ago, and the first season or two were fine. But watching the entire run with someone? Well, it turns out widely acclaimed cartoons are good, actually; we loved this. There's an corollary to rule of cool which says something like "rule of batshit crazy, if all of it matters": the short format, joke endings, and buck-wild worldbuilding mean that anything is possible, but the overarching plot & knack for call-backs means that it all has meaning. It's so fun & sincerely satisfying.

Bee and Puppycat: Lazy in Space
If I could live in any fictional world.... Look, this is a weird adaptation, both summarizing and retelling and altering the original run; and there's more plot, but somehow it doesn't manage to be any less weird or even to answer more questions. And yet! I loved this, loved its slow mundane pace and bizarro world and cotton-candy body horror.

Star Trek: Lower Decks
This actually gets modern Trek, it understands how to reflect lovingly on prior Trek without turning into a vain nostalgia machine; refocusing on the nobodies is the counterbalance I needed to every time I got really mad about Disco; it's actually funny. We burned through this in, like, two weeks.

NoClip
My takeaway from discovering this channel and devouring their documentaries is that games are hard to make; very hard, and made by people that love games. I don't mean people who own ginormous AAA studios; I mean that games are actually made by ridiculously overworked normal people who really love the medium. These two tenets are obvious but so ubiquitous and fundamental that they've altered how I view games.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners
This is utterly unbothered by happy endings, and that's as it should be: cyberpunk ought always be a larger-than-life technicolor grimdark capitalist shitshow. Great characters, great action, but what I love best is seeing what narratives can achieve when they're more concerned with good writing than with being nice or open to easy sequels.

Honorable Mentions in Visual Media

Squid Game
The particular way this handles cliffhangers is stupid. But boy howdy to I love a deadly game, and this is a great one: ridiculous aesthetics played against gratuitous gore, bucketloads of social commentary—all very much my jam.

Arcane
I've watched a lot of "cartoons for kids, but actually delightful as an adult, especially because an adult is able to appreciate the meteoric rise in queer content over the years" lately, and frankly I love those more. But the ability for a Western cartoon to be 300% for adults, actually; to be ruthlessly grim with gorgeous, intricate art.... Well. Turns out that's pretty great.

Knives Out and Glass Onion
I do not have any deep take here; I just love murder mysteries and cathartic social commentary/revenge fantasies, and the right level of camp. And a sequel that isn't bad!

Music

My Spotify top songs of 2022 is almost an identical list to last year's. It wasn't a big music year, and when I was listening it was to my usual playlists in the usual cycles.

Current Music: drops - [.que]

( So I played Tunic... )

Manuals often have that sense of wonder that Tunic evokes: maps, secrets, hithertofore unknown controls, lists of items—the game world is a puzzle box and the manual is a key. They introduce new gaming concepts, and seeing those concepts being explained to the player in their earliest iterations drives home how revolutionary they were, how they changed gaming, how complex gaming is and how much of it lexicon and culture we now take for granted. They have humor and narrative—some are running jokes, some are entirely in character. Some are just batshit crazypants, and I highly encourage reading the manual first and looking up gameplay second for the most anticipation/surprise. Some, absolutely, are boring.

Here are the manuals I read in 2022, organized by quality.

These ones are great

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (there's a manual, map, and hint book!)
This is the most direct inspiration to Tunic and indeed there's enough in the manual alone to inspire a whole dang other game. Fully illustrated! Pages of lore! A complete list of items! The magic of SNES Zelda is less "what's here" and more "by what madness do you navigate it" and the manuals perfectly lay out that enticing, lengthy conundrum.

We Love Katamari
Completely illustrated! And the conceit of illustrating game screenshots is so on-brand, so vibrant and whimsical. There's a fun running subplot in the foibles between the player stand-ins. The trademark series humor shines through the text. A delight.

Pokémon Blue
We take it for granted now, but the Pokemon premise is ridiculously complex and the bulk of that complexity is in Gen1: in the concept itself. The map's a tangle, the list of items and movement mechanics is lengthy, but it's the real complexity is the Pokemon themselves. This has the early entries for a pokedex, it introduces the vast rock-paper-scissors typing mechanic, it seems endless—so much to take in, such potential!

Cubivore
A forgotten Gamecube game which was a precursor to Spore, but weirder: bonkers premise, even stranger execution, with even more wild lore and illustrations(! really horrific illustrations!) in the manual. This is not indicative of the average manual reading experience; nonetheless if you just read one, make it this one.

Oddworld: Abe's Odysee
This sort of sarcastic, condescending, oddball humor is surprisingly common in manuals (see Earthworm Jim, below), but utterly at home in Oddworld; and I like Oddworld, so I find that the humor lands. This is what Thief (see below) wants to be: using humor to impress on players the necessity of setting new expectations for gameplay. Also it pokes fun at the waning use of manuals. Also it has a complete overview of the game, including all biomes. Funny and satisfying.

Cave Story+
A modern manual! And this is the perfect game for one. It's written with charming self-awareness, full of character blurbs and hand-drawn art and even a super-special secrets section, as full of retro love and style as the game itself.

These ones are pretty good

Pokémon Snap
Written from Oak directly to the player, which perfectly sells the "immersion, but in a themepark sort of way" premise of this game.

Contact
I've never heard of this little job-system RPG, but the game itself is secondary; the entire manual is written as a supporting character's online journal. Just like on DW, "mood" is pixel emojis of his space dog (that wants to be a space cat) Mochi. Entirely in character and stupidly charming.

Thief series (Thief: The Dark Project, Thief II: The Metal Age, Thief III: Deadly Shadows)
There's a lot of copy-pasting between manuals and a lot to skim. The opening lore is good, the moments of humor land, but what's most interesting here is how (particularly via that sarcastic, dark humor) the manuals are trying to drive home the idea of a whole new type of gameplay: move slow, play careful, we've invented this genre called "stealth." It's such an unassuming way to revolutionize gaming.

Earthworm Jim
Hints and tips: surrounding yourself with Earthworm Jim action figures will automatically make you the coolest person in your neighborhood. Excruciatingly self-aware but in a fun way in keeping with the series's style, while doing that distinctly satisfying manual thing of introducing every boss, biome, and item.

Harvest Moon
This has the Pokemon feel of introducing an entire new genre which feels so established and fundamental now but was borderline overwhelming at the time. Inspiring and adorable; even more than most retro manuals, this one makes me love pixel art.

Kirby's Dream Land
Kirby's sprite is deceptive, because his actual art design has changed so much and that's particularly clear in the manual. A great one, written primarily in Kirby's voice with a number of adorable, lively illustrations that have a startling disconnect from modern Kirb.

Kirby Super Star Ultra
Lots of cute art and a very information-dense, detailed overview down to different pick-ups and terrain items make up for an erstwhile lack of character. Not as memorable as Dream Land, but pleasing to look at.

Lemming's Manual
There's a strong overlap between games with a cute-but-weird style and good manuals, because the manuals tend to be art-heavy and the illustrated game space is quirky and fun. Further, this is written largely in Lemming PoV.

Equinox
Lots of little bits of art and an excess of guides to specific spells, weapons, and bosses; but the real pleasure here is playing "try to guess what the actual gameplay looks like from reading the manual alone, and fail."

Final Fantasy III
This is so information-dense that it's overwhelming: every item, equip, esper; detailed battle flow breakdowns; character bios with lists of their special abilities.... It lacks the ~vibes~ I hoped for from a Final Fantasy title, but it's one of those manuals that reminds how complex the games are/how unknown they were at the time/why we've since replaced this tool with 10-hour-long tutorials.

( These ones are forgettable )

Current Music: First Emotion - HyuN

The first of these is from, uh, May, and that's okay, that's legal. The others are from late-spooky-season horror reading: manga edition.

Title: My Capricorn Friend / Yagiza no Yuujin
Author: Otsuichi
Illustrator: Masaru Miyokawa
Published: 2014-2015
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 225
Total Page Count: 390,950
Text Number: 1467
Read Because: fan of the author
Review: When the school bully is murdered, our protagonist makes an impulse decision to flee with the primary suspect. This is delightfully Otsuichi: supernatural set dressing for a clue-driven murder mystery with a strong psychological bent. I noticed it also in Summer, Fireworks and My Corpse, but I've come to adore how Otsuichi handles daily minutiae—how heavy subject matter and suspense functions set against the charming banality of, frex, overnighting at a manga café. This isn't his most memorable, but Otsuichi never disappoints me and this is no exception. The art is solid—consistent, emotive, well suited to the tone.

Title: Happy Sugar Life
Author: Tomiyaki Kagisora
Published: Square Enix, 2015-2019
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 1905 (199+194+171+204+194+189+177+193+185+199)
Total Page Count: 411,515
Text Number: 1537-47
Read Because: reading horror manga, found on a rando list of horror manga
Review: Sato used to breeze through life, until she fell in love—a love she must keep secret and safe at any cost. I say this in every review of manga I read in my 30s, but: tone it back, tone it back just a little bit and it'll be even better. Particularly, fewer batshit-obsessive characters would make the protagonist's batshit-obsessive love even more striking, more chilling. Nonetheless, anime-ness and all (and it's very anime, given how loli and moe are used), I really liked this. It has a delicious premise and completely fulfills it: the idealized, toxic, unsustainable fantasy of dedicating everything to one love. Even better, the relationship is dynamic; that development in the lead-up to the climax is A+. There's also some engaging potential in the supporting characters (again, despite how extra everything is) and, a pleasant surprise, I buy the ending.

Title: Corpse Party: Blood Covered
Author: Makoto Kedouin
Illustrator: Toshimi Shinomiya
Published: 2008-2012
Rating: 2.5 of 5
Page Count: 1825 (368+352+352+352+400)
Total Page Count: 415,645
Text Number: 1559-68
Read Because: fan of the games
Review: Absolutely this isn't the best way to approach the Corpse Party franchise, and I don't know how to review it for newcomers beyond "nah, check out the game(s)." But as a way to revisit the story: interesting. Not entirely successful, but interesting.

This is often faithful, but not all of it translates. I love the room-by-room realization of the school in the early chapters, but that can't be sustained. The original plot, and the way it weaves in canon routes and bad ends, is significantly more interesting, but I like the manga's route in addition to those—another thread in the tapestry. The gore is good but the ghosts are so, so boring—I don't like how they're stylized. Some character moments are phenomenal: I am foremost Morishige trash and his scenes are all perfect, thank you, it's much appreciated. But the way that bodies are handled, that line where fanservice meets the embarrassing vulnerability of the flesh which persists no matter how outlandish the circumstances, a line so well tread in the first game in particular, is just awful here—it's all fanserivce all the way down, just embarrassing.

I have no regrets about reading this. I love the games, and this was a fun, easy way to revisit them that enriched my larger thoughts on the series. But at best it's only okay.

Current Music: A Wish... - Hiroki Kikuta - Secret of Mana OST

Games played while listening to these books: Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Astroneer. Astroneer was a solid "it's okay" out of five. I love the lego-clicky-physicality of it and the gameplay loop works well. But that loop isn't diverse or robust enough that it can get away with such minimal narrative; by the time I got to the end I was ready to be done. And that's fine! but maybe not ideal for a sandbox.

Been having solid luck with these books, though.

Title: Pilgrim's Wilderness: A True Story of Faith and Madness on the Alaska Frontier
Author: Tom Kizzia
Narrator: Fred Sanders
Published: Random House, 2013
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 290
Total Page Count: 389,715
Text Number: 1460
Read Because: more true crime on audio while gaming, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: This is absolutely a premise I've encountered in fiction: a family patriarch uses geography and social isolation to indoctrinate his family into a self-lead cut. And Kizzia takes a novel-esque approach, with a nonlinear narrative and a dual-stream narrative that tracks the family's external perception & interactions alongside its internal events. It's not so much "the truth is stranger than fiction"—just that the truth is compelling and painfully real. The escalations from suspicions of familial weirdness to first-person testimony of the father's abuse feels like a participant discovery in a distinctly culpable way: what warning signs will onlookers dismiss in favor of believing in the romance of a distant wild setting and a certain set of social aspirations? (And what petty community disputes will or won't finally bring those issues to a head?) Nuanced, eminently readable, evocative but in a way that recognizes how those same evocative elements can be leveraged as tools of grooming and abuse.

Title: Sex Cult Nun: Breaking Away from the Children of God, a Wild, Radical Religious Cult
Author: Faith Jones
Narrator: Jaime Lamchick
Published: HarperAudio, 2021
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 385
Total Page Count: 392,125
Text Number: 1485
Read Because: reivewed here, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: The memoir of a woman raised in the Children of God cult. Jones writes in "present tense," that is, from her changing perspective as she grew up, which humanizes and normalize what could read as an outlandish experience—while contextualizing how deeply fucked those experiences are, the realization not just of "my childhood wasn't normal" but of what normal should or shouldn't be, and how reoccurring (and thus totally "normal") social flaws and systems can be leveraged to build insular, powerful forms of social control. The most important thing I've learned from nonfiction about cults is that cult members can be anyone: specific cults target specific kinds of people, but those people aren't gullible, or stupid, or necessarily different except in their experiences; a memoir, with its local focus within a big picture, really hammers that home. The ending is rushed, perhaps inevitably, as healing falls outside of the scope of the cult and is probably harder to shape into a finished narrative. But on the whole this is compelling, personable, and honest.

Title: The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime
Author: Judith Flanders
Narrator: Jennifer M. Dixon
Published: Tantor Audio, 2019 (2011)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 555
Total Page Count: 393,250
Text Number: 1487
Read Because: reviewed by Katherine Addison, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: This catalogs Victorian trends in crime, crime reporting, policing, and popular culture as they gave rise to the modern concept of police and detectives. As such it's a morass of names and summaries of crimes real and fictional; this worked fine for me on audio, where I could let the book continue apace, sliding over names to get a general feel for the trends. It's dry, but dryly humorous; the glut of detail can overwhelm the author's actual arguments; aforementioned trends aren't surprising but are compelling, particularly the reminder that a) crime is profoundly politicized b) the public's relationship with crime and reporting has long been sensationalist and, most relevantly, c) the police in specific have never existed or operated in good faith or, like … competently.

New hobby, motivated by playing Tunic as discussed in the first review above: reading video game manuals/fictional video game manuals/bestiaries. Great fun! Very creative & evocative. I hope to talk about game manuals specifically at some future time, but here are a batch of PWYW/free bestiaries.

Title: Apple Quest Monsters DX
Author: Samanthuel Louise Gillson
Published: 2018
Rating: 3.5 of 5
Page Count: 110
Total Page Count: 389,825
Text Number: 1461
Read Because: played Tunic (see below); DX version is in the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality, original version is PWYW
Review: A mostly-bestiary with a touch of game manual for a video game that doesn't exist. It's a phenomenal premise, so captivating and imaginative. This is a light and breezy take on it, lots of self-aware humor and a dash of gotcha-style plot in the final entries. I'd've preferred something more serious—more gameplay elements, a better understanding of how the player moves through the biomes, and less humor although that last is definitely a me-problem. So, no, this didn't fill the hole in my life left by Tunic, which is what's gotten me into reading fictional and retro game manuals. But light and breezy is its own delight, and this has a good length and a fun style—the bestiary is in the "game"'s pixel art, and there are adorable, lively clay figure macros on the cover and endpages.

Title: Bynine Bestiary
Author: Taylor "Bynine" McMaster
Published: 2019
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 115
Total Page Count: 389,940
Text Number: 1462
Read Because: more manuals/bestiaries; ebook PWYW on itch.io
Review: Cute! Spooky! A bestiary for a fictional land, grouping monsters by biome and so moving from a cozy starting area-esque forest to a busy city and then deeper into increasingly wild and dangerous terrain. This isn't detailed or convincing enough for speculative evolution or a monster manual; the bestiary's user has annotated the text, which is a great conceit but not especially robust in execution. The puns also don't land for me, but I always complain about humor in books so, again, that's a me-problem. But the vibes—so quirky, inventive, thoughtful, sweet but deliciously spooky—get me so, so good, and the setting feels like a real, dynamic, magical world. I'm less enamored of the art. The monster designs are great but the finishing, particularly the font choices and color work, feel very digital in a way that kills some of the immersion. So not perfect, but a pleasure, and especially worth a PWYW price!

Title: Mud Maze Zug
Author: Jordan Speer aka beefstrong
Published: 2018
Rating: 2.5 of 5
Page Count: 30
Total Page Count: 390,725
Text Number: 1466
Read Because: more bestiaries; PDF version is free
Review: A field guide (more of a bestiary, really) for the dangerous, twice-forgotten dungeons of Zug. I'm not in love with the playdoh-y CG art style, although I admire its consistency and its sideways-retro effect. It makes this feel distinct from other bestiaries I've read lately, some sort of midpoint between DnD and retro game with heavy emphasis on the dungeon crawl. Fun! Does a bestiary's job of evoking the sense of a larger world. But not a favorite—not as whimsical or distinctive as I like.

Current Music: Breeze of Life - a_hisa

Title: All the Murmuring Bones
Author: A.G. Slatter/Angela Slatter
Published: Titan Books, 2021
Rating: 2.5 of 5
Page Count: 370
Total Page Count: 387,980
Text Number: 1455
Read Because: reviewed by

mrissa, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: The last remaining descendant of a once-powerful family with unusual ties to the sea flees a dangerous marriage. I was slow to warm to this and never got much above tepid. Some of that is the structure—this is more raggedy than other Slatter I've read, with a rambling narrative that makes for sequential (and not especially complex) reveals. Some of that is that the speculative, surprisingly fantastical elements of the worldbuilding are more interesting than the actual events of the plot. But the real culprit is that I don't like water as an aesthetic, be it beautiful or scary. And this is so much about aesthetic: very gothic, much mermaids; it's probably the weakest Slatter I've read, but she's got great vibes, and vibes could sell this ... if I were a better audience, but I'm not.

Title: Pleasant Dreams: The Welcoming Play of Kirby's Dream Land
Author: Joel Couture
Published: 2019
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 130
Total Page Count: 388,510
Text Number: 1457
Read Because: received in the itch.io Bundle for Ukraine
Review: An analysis of Kirby's Dream Land that explores how it welcomes newcomers to action-platformer games, teaching them the skills of the genre in a safe and inviting environment. This got me to go back and play Dream Land, which I skipped when I played the Kirby back catalog after falling in love with the series as an adult—I assumed Gameboy B&W wouldn't have the right Kirby vibe but I was totally wrong, and Couture nails the reasons it's a great game: the atmosphere, the controls, the difficulty curve, even the short and sweet length.

There's a lot to love in this game, and a lot of love in this book; I share the author's opinions on the value of "wholesome" games, both as entry points and for the ethos they bring to medium. But the writing is … rough. It's casual, which is fine, this is a personal book; but it's also ridiculously redundant. This should have been a 40 page chapbook. Recommended in spirit! … but in practice: skim it.

Title: Dark Rise (Dark Rise Book 1)
Author: C.S. Pacat
Published: HarperCollins, 2021
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 465
Total Page Count: 388,975
Text Number: 1458
Read Because: reviewed by Amy, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Behind the scenes of 1820s London, a secret war is raging between those who welcome and those who fear the return of the Dark King, a calamitous figure from a lost time of magic. The first half of this is a fine (and probably better in retrospective view of the second half) but standard chosen one/light vs. dark/fated destinies setup which is so delineated that it constantly begs: so, what are the complications?

But when those complications come, boy howdy, they come in handfuls and they're significant, personal, and ruthless. I can nitpick how it gets there and be justified (a lot of convenient eavesdropping; and there's a half-dozen moments when literally one (1) adult could ask "hey, wait, where are you sneaking off to?"), but the truth is that I don't care to because it's just too much fun—to see an author go completely feral destroying their own hard work; to develop momentum and significant character growth around tropey but effectively tropey and oh-so-satisfying developments; to arrive at an interesting, complicated conclusion that bodes well for the sequels I'm excited to read. The interpersonal dynamics are very shippy in a very Pacat way—this is a compliment, I'm the target audience, but it's not unsubtle.

Current Music: TipTipTip - Pedro Silva (Ooblets OST)

Pretend it's not just become February. Every year, sometimes very and exceedingly late, I post a list like this: Here's the best media I encountered, but which probably was not released, in 2021.

Books

I read over 220 "books" in 2021, but my records are particularly unreliable. ( Demographics and musings. )

The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, Mo Xiang Tong Xiu
I can't extricate the experience of the novel from the context of seeing The Untamed first; I love how they work in concert, that the book is the more complete story while feeling 200% like the world's most indulgent fanfic. Imminently satisfying. So good in fact that I didn't review it; how annoying that "loved it too much to talk about it" is a consistent indicator of my favorite works.

BL genre
I read and reread a lot of BL this year; and a lot is trash, but there's so many avenues for finding the specific trash which will really, really work for you, and that paid off for me. Highlights include rereading Sadahiro Mika, who is still a favorite; discovering the work of Harada, whose oneshots are some of the most intense and best crafted I've ever seen; Setona Mizushiro's The Cornered Mouse Dreams of Cheese & sequel, which are exquisitely realized; and finally reading Yun Kouga's Loveless, which got me so good with its indulgent, gorgeous aesthetic and surprisingly refined writing.

Wolves and Little Mouse's Big Book of Fears, Emily Gravett
I'm always down for a weird "is this actually for kids?" picture book, but Gravett was especially weird, and surprising, and delightful—and scary! There's more Gravett on my TBR, but I imagine these will remain favorites.

The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
This is inextricable for me from the process of learning toki pona, which is one of the more fulfilling things I did in 2021; to reread the work and to read it in translation into a new language meant spending significant, intimate time with it; not every text can hold up to that (although I also had a lot of fun reading Grimm's fairy tales in toki pona), but this one bloomed.

Honorable Mentions in Books

The Stranger Beside Me, Ann Rule and A Death in Belmont, Sebastian Junger
I had complex feelings, this year, about true crime as ~problematic~ or guilty pleasure; and then there were these books. They each lift an enormous weight: Rule's exhaustive, humanizing portrait of Bundy and of everyone involved in his narrative demystifies much of the cultural concept of serial killers. Junger approaches a single murder from an impressively holistic perspective, exploring not just its connection to a serial killer but the entire function of a racialized justice system.

Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake
I'm predominately a morbid nonfiction reader; this was a step outside of my comfort zone, but it turns out that listening to a nerd talk in profound and loving depth about their favorite thing can be comfort reading indeed.

Animal Land: Where there are no People, Sybil and Katherine Corbet
Whimsical, absurd, and delightful, with the added bonus of rediscovering a lost little passion project from 1897. I still think about it incessantly: A nasty biting Thing. Theres none more about it

A+E 4ever, I. Merey
I like that books as physical objects are becoming an increasingly small part of my life, but every now and then something violates that maxim. The experience of finding this in the library's discards and bringing it home and loving it when I may have never discovered it elsewise was such a joy.

Games

Outer Wilds
I played this in February and went, well, game of the year; and was right. I also read the original thesis, and nothing can better illustrate how and why the game succeeds. Exploration is the only goal and reward, which creates incredible immersion and ownership in a journey of discovery that lives up to that level of investment. And this just gets me, thematically, in a way that holds up a mirror to Dark Souls, paralleling and reversing its image. Also the music makes me cry.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Last year I said "I hope this will be on my best of list next year, when I can return to the completed game," and here we are next year, and I was right! I picked this back up with the 2.0 update, and a completed New Horizons is robust, gorgeous, and chock full of quality of life improvements. I'm still playing for hours a day. I'm on the brink of finishing a town/island for the first time ever. I couldn't be happier with the game now.

Phogs
I've never made such quick turnaround from seeing the cover image to dropping everything to play co-op with Teja, and never recommended a better co-op game for our friendship in particular. Phenomenal aesthetics in the level design; puzzles more clever than difficult, making great use of a very silly premise; almost any time you wonder "can I..." "what would happen if..." there's 1) an answer and 2) an achievement for it; in every moment a pleasure, but especially with a friend who really wants to be half of a rubber-noodle dog.

The Wild at Heart
Pikmin gameplay meets Don't Starve art style but it's set in a whimsical, enchanted wood and the soundtrack is phenomenal. Average time to 100% is ~15 hours and I played it for 60, so take that as a measure of how immersive and delightful I found this game & how exhaustively I explored it.

Honorable Mentions in Games

Journey to the Savage Planet
I 100%'ed a lot of games this year (the previous two titles included) and this was another one of them because everything it does re: exploration and collection is done so well, and the ruthlessly irreverent humor, surprisingly, lands. Great art style, great movetech, very satisfying to eat orange goo.

Halo Infinite
I love Halo a lot, I love 343's Halo a lot. I have mixed-to-positive feels about the narrative/genre structure here which I will continue to resolve when I co-op is released, seven eternities from now. Some of the multiplayer decisions, specifically re: the leveling system, but also re: weapons, make me big mad. But a Halo with caveats is still a Halo I'll play nightly with friends for a calendar year, and: Cortana! forever my beloved!

Wilmot's Warehouse
This is objectively insubstantial, but never has a game been as satisfying as "organize boxes by whichever category you deem most logical." (Color, by the way: color is the answer and makes for such satisfying screenshots. But trying theme-based sorting gave this a lot of replayability.) I really like this Polygon video on it & on organizing in general.

NeiR Replicant ver.1.22474487139...
This year I played NieR: Automata myself for the first time and this remake made it possible to finally see the whole of NieR Replicant/Gestalt (since my partner burned out on the combat when playing the original Gestalt release); unsurprisingly, given my love of the series in theme and format, a great experience where all parts enrich the whole.

Psychonauts 2
A long-awaited sequel that fulfills expectation is no small feat; this really does preserve the strengths of the first game. I love how the style adapts to modern-day graphics and love a lot of the late-game level design.

Visual Media

Steven Universe
I can't say that I've ever cried so much watching a show, excepting probably Star Trek: Deep Space 9. Every time we had questions about worldbuilding, about a backstory, about how an event would impact a character, the show had answers: it has an incredible grasp of the through-line, of the fridge horror, of the slow but meaningful pace of true character growth. And it's so, so gorgeous.

Home Movie: The Princess Bride
During the pandemic, a vast ensemble of quarantined actors recreated The Princess Bride on their smart phones, wielding the worst props and the greatest love. There are line reads that are on point not just to the script but to all the quirks of filming and acting and the vibe of the film where it's like, this isn't a script, this is the memory of watching the movie a hundred times—the same memories I have. Hilarious; cried a lot, too.

Critical Role Campaign 2
I don't have the emotional investment in the second campaign that I had in the first, which has a gothic/angsty vibe that really worked for me and similarly angsty character arcs that struck a personal note. But Campaign 2 has universal improvements in quality: accessible, slick, improved acting, a more distinctive big bad, a good length, and also Jester Lavorre is there. Making hundreds of hours feel easily watchable is a feat and I loved the time I spent gaming while watching, even if I didn't love-love it with the unhinged intensity of C1.

Honorable Mentions in Visual Media

Bee and Puppycat
This is what made me finally pick up Steven Universe, because I like the narrative but I love the vibes—cotton candy sci-fi and trauma and millennial humor. I feel this becoming a comfort rewatch.

Reality TV, particularly Great British Bake Off series 12, Forged in Fire, and Blown Away
My partner & I always pick up a reality TV show to watch in between other things and then, if it's the right reality TV show about competence at a practical/artistic skill with a minimum manufactured social drama, we ignore everything else to watch the thing. There was nothing more that I wanted in 2021 than that escapism. Cozy, satisfying; most definitely flawed, but so slight that, really, who cares.

Music

My Spotify top songs of 2021. Almost nothing not instrumental video game/rhythm game music made it on there so, even more than usual, I probably spent a lot of time with my in the background playlist. But there's a touch of oldies (since I finally built up a 60s-70s playlist) and a smidgen of the same moody bullshit I listen to & love every autumn.

Particular highlights:
Spicy Boyfriend by Shawn Wasabi is at the top of the list because it became my cat October's official theme song. The entire lyrics are "I love you so so so so much," and I do.
As above, The Wild at Heart soundtrack is superb.

Current Music: Death's Door OST - David Fenn

I started listening to My Favorite Murder while doing my no fast travel 100%-ish Breath of the Wild run (~750 korok so far) and was like, yanno what might be even better than the easy-listening recitation of Wikipedia pages is maybe some true crime books on audio, so I've been listening to ... true crime books ... on audio.

( Thoughts on reading true crime post-2020-BLM. )

Title: American Predator: The Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century
Author: Maureen Callahan
Narrator: Amy Landon
Published: Penguin Audio, 2019
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 295
Total Page Count: 376,450
Text Number: 1393
Read Because: just going through a lot of true crime rn; audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Not that it's a surprise, but law enforcement is a farce. The subtitle—"the most meticulous serial killer of the 21st century"—creates a framing that highlights the unexpectedly simple, albeit laborious, techniques that Keyes used to evade detection: less an especially brilliant murderer; more a capable one who exploited retrospectively obvious weaknesses in human nature and law enforcement in particular. The prosecution of his case is frequently cringe-worthy.

The reverse narration echoes the structure of Keyes's testimony, beginning with his final known victim and then, following the investigation, backtracking through his development and prior crimes. This delays the "meticulous" subtitle to good effect, illustrating the ways a serial killer's pathology and behavior escalate into chaos; like the speech patterns and filler words preserved in his testimony, it's a deeply unromanticized depiction. But an insightful and interesting one, since Keyes possessed such textbook characteristics but committed relatively diverse crimes. I went into this never having heard of Keyes; I came out satisfied & knowing significantly more. The audiobook narration isn't memorable but it's more than adequate.

Title: The Trial of Lizzie Borden
Author: Cara Robertson
Narrator: Amanda Carlin
Published: Simon Schuster Audio, 2019
Rating: ???? of 5
Page Count: 75 of 375
Total Page Count: 376,825
Text Number: 1394
Read Because: just going through a lot of true crime rn; audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: DNF at 20%. While I didn't read enough to make a judgement, but the text itself seems fine, a little dry perhaps, but thorough and providing productive historical context. But I prefer to read my true crime in audio, and the narrator is pretty bad: flat, weird delivery of quotations, and when sped up legit sounds computer-generated.

Title: A Death in Belmont
Author: Sebastian Junger
Narrator: Kevin Conway
Published: HarperAudio, 2006
Rating: 5 of 5
Page Count: 290
Total Page Count: 377,465
Text Number: 1399
Read Because: just going through a lot of true crime rn; audiobook borrowed from the Wilsonville Public Library
Review: A 1963 murder that fit the pattern of the Boston Strangler was instead attributed to another man. Breaking down this case requires seeing it in context: the Boston Strangler and Albert DeSalvo, who confessed to those crimes (but not this one); Roy Smith, convicted of this murder, a black man and petty criminal, and therefore demographically predisposed to become a suspect; the flaws, both innate and cultural, of the legal system. It's a holistic approach to a specific focus, satisfying not because it has answers but because it's radically open to uncertainty. Easily some of the best true crime I've read.

Every year, sometimes super duper late, I write this list. Here's the best media I consumed, but which was probably not released (or even new to me!), in 2020. There sure are a lot of books.

Books

I read ~243 books in 2020. That's an intentional step down from last year's 374, but higher than expected; my prior average was ~150 a year. ( Reading wrap-up musing. )

The Birthday of the World and Other Stories, Ursula K. Le Guin
Crossing the last Hainish book off of my TBR would have been more bittersweet had this not been so good. The series has incredible breadth, but never enough—and this answers that, peering into the cracks in civilizations in a way that insists on increasingly dynamic, diverse worlds. Ratings are meaningless, but this was my my first five-star of the year and one of the only short story collections to ever warrant that rating.

Piranesi, Susanna Clarke
I'm an easy sell on exploring infinite spaces conceptually; what amazed me here is how solid it is in execution without feeling overworked—it's a delicate, balanced, beautiful little book. Again ratings mean nothing, but this is my last 5-star review of the year, and what a high note to end on.

Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Naomi Mitchison
I love when a longtime entry on my TBR is worth the wait. The literal feminist elements have grown dated, but the underlying approach absolutely fulfills this intent: high-concept alien worldbuilding (fun!) with a fundamentally social, interpersonal, communicative, sexual lens (engaging, satisfying!).

Elemental Logic series, Laurie J. Marks
I came to these when I needed to distracted by a totally different world that still interrogated what it means to inhabit, be response for, and change a world. They had a significant positive impact on a shitty year.

Edward Gorey
Bind-ups make Gorey's work so accessible and encourage a deep-dive into his experimentation, running themes, and the conversation between his books. He's like "what if potato chips were also a satisfying, complete meal"—tiny, addictive, even repetitive, but substantial.

The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, Chris Van Allsburg
Some childhood favorites live up to their memory, and this is literally about spinning a single illustration into an entire imagined narrative—which is childhood memory in a nutshell.

Honorable Mentions in Books

The Steerswoman series, Rosemary Kirstein
This was on my list in 2016 (and maybe one day I will actually give it a proper review), but let it be known that it is even better upon reread: the reveals are so well plotted; the beauty of revelation is more keenly felt for anticipating it. I don't know that I've ever had such a successful reread, which is no small achievement.

Goth & Goth (manga), Otsuichi
The novel was on my list in 2015 when I first read it. Rereading both it and the manga together only makes me wish I'd also rewatched the film—this is one of my favorite stories and I love how it alters/reinforces in iteration.

Vita Nostra, Marina and Sergey Dyachenko
Inversions of the magical school trope & I have since hit it off, but this is where I first encountered it and it continues to be my gold standard—not because it's a perfect book, but because what it does with this trope is so thorny that it entangles even the reader in its broken logic and magical transformation.

Blame!, Nihei Tsutomu
The film adaptation was on my list in 2017; the manga is a different beast entire. A nod to the mention of NaissanceE and Control, below, which pushed me to read this. In what turned out to be a year of conceptualizing the inconceivable infinite, this was one of the least plotty but most memorable.

Carmilla, Sheridan Le Fanu
I love the new insights prompted by a reread, but I also love when a reread lives up to every memory—and this is as rich, sensual, unsettling, and gratifying as I remember it to be. What better possible takeaways could there be from this particular book?

A Phantom Lover, Vernon Lee
Queer women writing women in horror makes for exceptional character sketches—unprettied; compelling. I can't wait to read more Lee; I feel like I'm saving her as a future gift for myself.

When I Arrived at the Castle, Emily Carroll
This makes me wish all of Carroll's work were standalone and written first for the page (some of her comics are more successful in their original scrolling digital format) because it's nearly flawless—a visceral, intimate fairytale-horror.

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, Angela Carter
This is that perfect storm of repeated failed reviews: what more could I say about this famous thing? and how can I describe such a fierce pleasure? I love this now more than ever—such excesses! such productive thematic contradiction between stories!

Pennterra, Judith Moffett
Like Memoirs of a Spacewoman, this was another longterm TBR resident that met all those years of expectation. My notes read "alien/human sex book" and boy howdy is it that—a complex, uneasy, but fundamentally joyful and compassionate exploration of entirely alien, very thorough sex.

Leopold and Loeb: The Crime of the Century, Hal Higdon
Consider this the thematic cousin to Graham's So Brilliantly Clever, on this list in 2015: this crime also fascinates me; this treatment is thorough, sympathetic, and never exculpatory. It handles the queer elements with particular grace.

Games

NaissanceE
I played this back in February, called it as my game of year then, and I was right. This is my every fear of heights, falling, scale, and insignificance embodied in a breathing human form and a massive inimical space. I've never had such a visceral reaction to a game. I've linked to it before, but I found this through Jacob Geller's video, which is great and speaks to elements that worked for me. The game is free! Play it!

Control
I watched my partner play this, and watching spared me from most of its flaws re: actual gameplay. But what it achieves beyond those flaws is entirely up my alley and contributed to a good year for media about inhospitable architecture and existential dread. I love best Jesse's response to the unknown: that she seeks it doesn't render it any less dangerous, but she still seeks it—the unknown is her home and companion.

Anodyne 2: Return to Dust
Playstation-era graphics are highly underexploited as nostalgia bait; I love the 3D aesthetic. I streamed this for Teja and read all the dialogue aloud, which made me/us linger over the game more than we would have otherwise. I did more grief processing in playing this game than I have in the entire time since my dad died. Dust is sin, dust makes us mortal—and all that means is that dust is life.

Honorable Mentions in Games

Animal Crossing: New Horizons
I don't put this under honorable mentions to discredit it—it came out at just the right time and reshaped my quarantine. But I stopped playing it over summer because I needed to transition away from that coping method and because I don't enjoy the cycle of preemptive investment created by seasonal patches. I hope this will be on my best of list next year, when I can return to the completed game.

Ooblets
I was really anticipating this and played it in early access—indeed it's everything I hoped for: wholesome, excessively quirky, stupidly cute. But I'm not keeping up with patches for the same reason as AC:NH; I'll return when it's finished.

Human Fall Flat
I played a lot of co-op games this year. This was unlike the rest: puzzles instead of gunplay or gamified progression, so we spent less time with it, but also cooperative, creative, with hilariously squishy funsics—it was some of the purest fun I had all year.

Luigi's Mansion series
The joy of playing a Nintendo franchise is watching the gameplay improve and the environments grow ever more lovingly detailed; the joy of this series in specific is unmitigated spoop. The combination is a Halloween delight that immersed me in my favorite season.

Visual Media

Hannibal
This was on my list in 2015 and has secretly been there in every intervening year because I kept rewatching it while building forward in the series and working up the courage to finish season 3—because I love this show so much that more is overwhelming and the idea of it ending is even worse. Ironically s3 was the perfect answer to that anxiety, reflecting obsessively over the series in the same way I do and then ending so, so well.

The Untamed
I was a reluctant sell on this, both for its viral popularity and for its cold open, which works in retrospect is a cheesy, confusing introduction. But it got me so good. The long, slow, tragic, intimate burn of it pays back that initial investment hundredfold, and I'm delighted that their solution to adapting under censorship was to create a plethora of queer subtext even where it doesn't exist in the source material.

Honorable Mentions in Visual Media

Jacob Geller
I sure do love a video essay, but Geller's precise fascination with existential horror and his penchant for "wait, hold on, I promise they're related" interconnections between stories and subjects is so much my style that in a very alternate universe this could be my channel—meanwhile in this universe, I have the videos without the massive effort of making them.

Big-concept SF B-movies
I'm talking Cube's survival game or Coherence's parallel worlds with a twist ending. These were my answer to quarantine: their tension mirrors real life but the engaging-to-ridiculous high concept premises distract from it entirely. The very best of these was Predestination, which is so queer, surprisingly clever, and a strong adaptation of a promising but dated work.

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power
"This is so good," I said with a sense of confused wonder after every episode (after the first handful). My standards were set for Voltron: Legendary Defender: watchable, sometimes good, but a little dumb and/or constrained by format. What I got is something that feels intentional from the onset, with consistent, slow, delicate character growth and a joyful lived diversity.

A Portrait of a Lady on Fire
The female gaze as a reciprocal dynamic, the careful details, the perfect balance of its ending--this left me clarified and sobbing.

Music

Here's my Spotify Wrapup for 2020. In autumn I made a long, messy playlist of the spooky/edgy/Southern Gothic trash I listen to every autumn; in autumn I also made music a big part of my daily activities, so this is the bulk of my top 100.

The other highlight was Cereal Dreamers: Spooky Stories, a collaborative (made to order? royalty free?) collection of spoopy background music that I find incredibly charming.

Current Music: a_hisa

What a weird [vaguely mumbled unit of time], just like everyone else's, but still.

I did a good job making October an All Spooks, All the Time month, which I've been carrying through November with mixed success. I pulled out a bunch of the spoopy films from our shelves, the stupider the better, and even managed to watch a few. Devon and I rewatched season 1 & 2 of Hemlock Grove, and then wisely decided against rewatching the third season, which was such a flop that there aren't even wiki summaries. I've been trying to read fanfic to scratch the itch instead, but I find myself stymied by the "shit on the female character that gets in the way of my favorite gay ship" approach of most fans. Season 2 is often a mess, season 3 sure does said female character dirty, and the technique of using a woman as go-between to explore homoerotic tension without making it actually gay is gross—but the end of season 2 leans to a bisexual polyam triad which isn't bad rep and isn't "in the way of" the gay ship and actually could be fascinating???? more of that, please, and less misogyny, thank you.

The highlight of the season was that by some luck I managed to line my library hold of Luigi's Mansion 3 up with November, so I played the first and second game in October. I still begrudge Nintendo their reliance on nostalgia as they marginally update the same handful of franchises, but, as with my experiences with Kirby and Zelda, I'll admit the format works and that watching those old, janky, limited-by-their era franchises expand with better gameplay, quality of life improvements, and particularly the bigger and better-rendered graphics in Nintendo's delightful plastic/squishy silicone playmobile aesthetic is actually fun. This series is the purest, greatest spoop, silly and cute and aesthetic and charmingly detailed.

My personal highlights: 1) Luigi humming the theme/bg music when idling in the second game, just like me. 2) That the singular annoyance of boo-catching in the first game pays off in the third game, when you cathartically whip the boo back and forth.

⁂

But the months themselves have been a blur. We lost early autumn to, you know, terrifying Oregon wildfires. We lost a week of mid-autumn when our upstairs neighbor's washing machine exploded and flooded our bathroom & ceiling, leaving us with three industrial fans and a dehumidifier in the central hallway where there was no escape from the sensory hell of heat, noise, and teeth-achingly dry air. Autumn came stop-motion: the smoke cleared and suddenly the leaves had changed; the fans were removed, and suddenly it was cold.

And then the election, which by singular blessing/curse I now almost entirely through a Destiel lens, which is not how I wanted or expected to remember those fever-dream days but here we are! And now Oregon goes back into lockdown that everyone will violate for the holidays, as I wish I could violate it too because being denied the chance to visit family, and the particular loneliness and fear of quarantine, makes me want to despite that I usually avoid it.

Two days ago I made a quick call to my uncle, who asked about the wildfires since that was the last thing we had talked about. Were they contained? had we stayed safe? And time slowed and I took a brief trip out of my body as I tried to recall the crisis before the election but after that COVID and before this COVID which took place in that distant time called ... two months ago—just two months. Strange, long months in a strange, long year.

Current Music: shadowshow - iamamiwhoami

CW for wildfire talk, COVID talk, dead dad talk I guess.

The city I'm living in entered green/"get ready to evacuate" status in the first week of the Oregon wildfires (specifically the Lionshead fire), but thankfully never progressed beyond that and de-escalated after ~5 days when the rain came. Air quality was a worse problem for longer, but has since improved thanks in large part to more rain. On one hand, taking photographs of all your valuables, organizing all your important documents into one box, and similar emergency prep work isn't bad to have done; on the other hand, staring into the reality of "these are my physical possessions which, like huge swathes of my state, could be gone forever" is terrifying, and it's just a lot of process on top of the everything else which is also just a lot to process.
Example: I had library materials due during the fires which, lol, no. But when I checked the library website they were like "we're extending our already-extended checkouts because the state is literally on fire and we're closed so please don't come in"—which is lovely, their communication and accommodations and safety perceptions have been consistently great, and tbh I wish the checkout periods and no late fees were always this generous. But. "The library, which just reopened after the plague-related closure, is closed again because its entire district is on fire" is so ridiculously indicative of this fucking year and I hate it.
The only thing that can make quarantine worse is an air quality advisory! ...Honestly, I appreciate temporary moments of isolation, struggle, deprivation, that power outage/snowed in feeling. But the apocalyptic moodlighting, that "weekend home in Lothric*" feeling, isn't the same. It's claustrophobic, it's heavy; it made me feel trapped in a way quarantine hasn't, given my native agoraphobia.

* Lothric is the city in Dark Soul 3 and I actually have a lot of feelings about living in Dark Souls, which is effectively one of my hearthomes even tho hearttype/hearthome language doesn't usually appeal to me. But when you live in Dark Souls you are part of the lifecycle of Dark Souls, which I've written about in depth before. I find that framework cathartic and productive ... but I don't wish it upon this nation and this planet in 2020; indeed, the dystopic fantasy of burn it down, start over is actively counterproductive. Our world (our people) can't be recreated from the ashes; our world shouldn't be liberated from that endless cycle of staving off destruction; that fiction distracts us from the necessary of work of healing. My point here is that my vacation in Lothric was bittersweet. It was in many ways a concrete externalization of the existential fear of global warming et al.: look ye, look ye, for the world is literally on fire, the sky is red as if the eclipse hung in the heavens!! But the cause and solution are markedly different, and the closeness of that fictional framework isn't a comfort—it's terrifying.
We emerged from wildfire haze to discover that autumn was here? ??? It's picturesque in comparison, these bluegrey rains and yellowdead leaves. August, who has been a little standoffish because of summer heat and her general wariness since the introduction of the overly-social babyboy cat, has begun to insist on daily snuggles in a warm lap. I've already made one batch of apple sauce, which came out closer to stewed or even caramelized apples, deep brown and caramel savory/sweet, without losing their chopped texture. I'll start on the next batch when I'm done with this post. I have pumpkin bread planned! It's great.
And Speaking of Toby! The fur he lost at the humane society from the combo neuter surgery and collar has all grown in (and probably his winter coat is coming in, too), and he is again transformed. It turns out that's where he was hiding all his fluff. His cheeks in particular have grown a little lion mane. I didn't think there could ever be another cat I might love as much as August ... but things seem to be developing in that direction. I'm so proud of the gradual improvement in interactions between Toby and August, and glad that I taught him tricks off the bat because having "good boy" as a way to provide instant feedback on his behavior is so useful. I love cats every day, love mine every day, would not be complete or happy without them ... but I love them most in autumn, the most picaresque season to have two black cats, one coincidentally named October.
My dad died in October, and I hate & am grateful for that timing. Anticipating that anniversary contaminates my favorite season, but loving this season offsets that dread. And as little spiritual as I've turned out to be, that autumnal cycle of death still resonates in a way that makes it feel like a natural time to mourn.

( CW food. )

⁂

As I've mentioned, I've been borrowing video games from the library. The holds are long and the checkouts are 7-days, so only certain titles work and it creates a unique gameplay experience. It's perforce a title I'm not hugely invested in, something with a limited length, something not worth owning—but then I play the whole ~35 hour game in a week, with more focus and therefore immersion than I might give to a title I purchase and play for longer. I played Let's Go Eevee that way, which tbh is the only way to play the game. Most PKMN games are for me 200+ hours because I'm big into breeding and shiny hunting, but the central gimmick of Let's Go leans heavily towards overpowered single-Pokemon team and the shiny hunting mechanic is cute but the endgame is otherwise shallow; it's very much a 35 hour game.

And I just finished Super Mario Odyssey, which is my first Mario title! and which I only played because it has assist mode! which mitigates health management and largely does away with dying to void-outs. I love Nintendo's gentle/exploratory platforms but hate actual platforming because I can't spacial reasoning or operate under pressure, that's just not fun. So bless assist modes & may this be a thing in all future titles—it's never the wrong time to increase accessibility. 7 days were just enough time to do 500 stars worth of exploring with that satisfied feeling of every curiosity and corner offering a reward, and the due date came when I was hitting hard, unfun content I didn't want to play anyway.

I still contend that core franchise Mario titles are ugly AF with bad world aesthetics and (non-musical) sound design, and that the way gender issues are handled in the endgame cinematic is the worst of Nintendo's too little, too late methodology: something about the high-rez art style makes the forced marriage & objectification of Peach even more glaring, and you can't do that—play it straight, play it at length—for the entire game and then critique it in endgame and expect a cookie for your progressive vision. (The high-rez style also makes the cap-control mechanic feel weird, like ... it's an innately ridiculous game, I shouldn't be considering issues of consent and autonomy, and yet here we are.)

Petition that the next Mario title pulls a Metal Gear Solid 2, opening with Mario in the tutorial levels and then staring Peach for the entire rest of the game with no option to switch characters. Maybe she even rescues him, tbh I don't care. I hope the fanboys will be as mad about it as they were about MGS2.

⁂

The pattern of playing a lot of condensed game leads naturally to not playing almost anything afterward, to recover from burnout and rest my wrists. I've been reading a lot! Some very good books! But I'm fatally behind on reviews and honestly should be writing those right now, not this.

It's funny that after reading so much last year, I'm not burned out on books—just on writing about them. My reading distinctly hasn't been a passive thing, lately, in no small part because discovering OpenLibrary/the Internet Archive has made accessible some of those obscure feminist SFNal works which have been on my TBR for years and years. It's active, sometimes even combative reading, but that means I exhaust my reading-energy both in that engagement and at the mere thought of trying to write all of it down. Not writing reviews isn't an option for me, but as well as relearning the art of longer, messier reviews when a condensed one is impossible, I should also embrace the adage that anything worth doing is worth half-assing (rather than not doing at all) and just ... not write book reports, maybe even of things that deserve them.

⁂

Incredible and borderline-unmanageable spike in back pain over the last ~2 weeks. This flare is remarkable in part for its duration, which is generally a sign that it's not a flare but a new plateau in my fun experience with a degenerative condition. Also remarkable because it's been interfering with sleep, particularly waking me up after ~4 hours & sometimes making it impossible to go back to sleep. That combo is utterly terrifying. I already do seven million things manage pain for sleep, so there's nothing I can do to improve things; sleep is already hard because of my brainweird; poor sleep is a trigger for ... more pain.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

These plateaus are always worse when I'm still adjusting to them. In a few months, it'll be background noise, just ... noisier noise than the old noise. But when I frequently don't feel pain, only symptoms of pain—when the bar of "distressing" and "disabling" is constantly shifting upward to hover at whatever level of pain I've grown used to—it makes me wonder: what is a pain scale, objectively (is there such a thing as "objective"); where do I fall on it; when will I tip over to an un-adjustable level. I hope this isn't it.

Every year, sometimes very late, I write a list like this. Here's the best media I consumed, but which was probably not released, in 2019. Beware: books.

Books

I somehow missed a month when calculating my running tally. It turns out that not only was I on track to read a book a day, I read 374 books in 2019. That's more than double my usual, which for the last few years averaged to 150. It's deceptive because I read a lot of short books, but I also increased my pages read by 50% over the last few years: more short books, but more reading in general.

( Reading wrap-up musings. )

Animorphs series, K.A. Applegate
For years this would come up on my feed and I'd be struck by nostalgia but also wonder why people were still talking about that MG series. I get it now! This is a hot mess, but so successful despite and because of that mess: substantial character arcs made more accessible by pulpy serialization; challenging themes hidden under a premise of wish-fulfillment and made memorable by body horror. Mainlining this series came when I most needed to be absorbed in something & shaped my entire reading year.

X and Tokyo Babylon, Clamp
These were formative series for many, but while other Clamp was formative for me I didn't read these until 2019—and they're as id-delighting and imprint-worthy now as they would have been then, which is the highest praise I can think of for Clamp.

Picture Books
Easy access to a physical library opened the world of picture books to me, and it was a revelation. Short, visual stories written for children are unbounded, atmospheric, condensed. They're perfect palette cleansers and punchy seasonal reading. And, as mentioned in my musing above, diverse children's creators are hiding throughout history, and I'm delighted to discover them. Some favorites: I Am a Witch's Cat, Harriet Muncaster (affirming, charming, comforting), Millions of Cats, Wanda Gág (the oldest picture book still in print is written by polyamorous woman!), Goodnight Moon & The Runaway Bunny, Margaret Wise Brown (as good as I remember), The Bones of Fred McFee, Eve Bunting (highlight of my spooky picture book binge), The Tea Dragon Society, Katie O'Neill (this is more MG, but: if McKinley wrote secondary-world graphic novels)

Maurice Sendak
My Sendak deep-dive helped me recontextualize and relearn the art of reading picture books. Sendak claimed not to write for kids so much as to be read by kids, and to some extent I agree: he inhabits a child's mind, he teaches, but he also writes intuitive, humorous dreamscapes and experiments that the reader—child or elsewise—just happens to visit. Some highlights: Where the Wild Things Are; Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or, There Must Be More to Life. My favorite: Kenny's Window.

Ruth Krauss
Sendak illustrated so many of her books that the two are almost inseparable, and the interplay between her declarative sentences and his evocative doodles is fantastic. Krauss more than any picture book author I read this year truly inhabits a child's mind, speaking with them, going strange places with them. Some highlights: A Hole is to Dig, I'll Be You and You Be Me. My favorite: Charlotte and the White Horse.

"The Fourth Pig," Naomi Mitchison
Has a short story ever been on my favorites list? (No.) This retelling/sequel of the three little pigs and their identity built around the-wolf-who-is-death speaks directly to my personal metaphors. It's bewitchingly written, strange and intense, but its effect on me exceeds objective judgement—the happenstance of the perfect reader for a particular narrative.

Honorable Mentions in Books

The Were-Wolf, Clemence Housman
Some classic examples of genre writing feels staid in view of all that's followed it; some can still invigorate the genre, and the treatment of gender and particular niche of werewolf tropes here are brilliant and bracing.

Portal Fantasy

staranise mused on Tumblr about the resurgence of the portal fantasy genre and I largely agree with her reasoning. The result has been a new generation of portal fantasy interrogating and subverting the genre: how do you get there, what happens when you leave, how does it change you, who believes you, what are the boundaries of a "portal." These stories are frequently flawed, but I adore the trend, which does my favorite thing with one of my favorite tropes. 2019 is somewhere in the height of this resurgence, and reoccurred throughout my reading.

Id-Novel Catch-All
2019 contained a preponderance of novels that appealed directly to my id—genres I like, dynamics I like, atmospheres I like, united only by the arbitrary feeling of indulgence. Some highlights: The Monster of Elendhaven, Jennifer Giesbrecht (wintery Dunwall + soulbonded sociopaths); Strange Grace (run into the dark and magical forest to follow your beloveds); Expedition, Wayne Barlowe (an entire planet of speculative evolution); Black Wine (a loose knit of language, polyamory, identity); White Wing, Susan Shwartz and Shariann Lewitt (group marriage space opera); On a Sunbeam, Tillie Walden (space whales, space ruins, space coming of age), Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf (we are connected but isolated by the way our personal paradigms can't contain one another's experiences), and particularly:

Autonomous, Annalee Newitz
This is everything I want in a AI/robot narrative, distilled almost to a concentrated state. It's critical, engaged, and awash with speculative elements, but digs down so gritty to precise and subversive issues of sex, bodies, identity—those elements hooked me hard.

Games

Kingdom Hearts
2019 was the year that Kingdom Hearts III came out, and in preparation I finished playing through (nearly) all of the side-games, which were engaging in themselves and critical to the pay-off of the final game. It's the culmination of decades of my emotional investment, and thus resonates despite any quibbles with KHIII.

Honorable Mentions in Games

Deemo (Switch version)
Deemo was on my list in 2016, but this year I discovered 1) checking out video games from the library, which makes for an fevered week of binging before the due date, and 2) the Switch port of this, the best of rhythm games—which on Switch is a full-priced game containing NG+ and every song-pack.

Poochy & Yoshi's Woolly World & Yoshi's Crafted World
I adore the soft line of Nintendo spin-offs which are sweeter and easier than their platforming origins. These aren't as clever in concept as the inimitableKirby's Epic Yarn, but they're a joy.

Untitled Goose Game
What it lacks in longevity it makes up for in commitment.

Visual Media

Person of Interest
This was on my list in 2017, but this time I watched it with Devon—and to my surprise it was better on rewatch, anticipating every character arc and catching all the foreshadowing, alternately vibrating with suppressed spoilers or discussing the speculative elements in depth.

Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir
This began as—and absolutely still is—a guilty pleasure, but it's improved with every season; the writing and characterization is solid, and it has a superb ability to preserve tension while still moving the narrative forward. Quality brain-candy.

Music

2019 was the year I started using Spotify, and my top songs of 2019 list is on-point and provides a seasonal tour of my yearly musical tastes: weird lady artists (spring), video game-esque instrumental (summer), and southern gothic & werewolves (autumn). Is it disjointed in collection? sure is.

Devon's halfdays off through Hanukkah lead seamlessly to halfdays/full days off for the new year, so I'm just now emerging from 10 days of hanging out with my partner, watching TV and eating good food and playing The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening.

(Which I adored, btw. It's everything I want a modern remake to be: retro feel with quality of life improvements to alleviate the frustrations of older titles and a high-poly charming playmobil-style aesthetic. I never did finish A Link to the Past because the combat grew too frustrating; this is the answer to the parts of retro games that don't hold up. I'd probably put it third-ish on my favorite Zelda game list, following Breath of the Wild and Twilight Princess. It's not a holistic ranking, because The Wind Waker and Ocarina of the Time have much more substantial narratives, but they're just not as enjoyable to play.)

It was the perfect vacation. My sleep cycle runs around 3a-noon, so Devon was effectively around my entire day. Between on-call days and scheduled company holidays, the ten-day vacation took just three total days of PTO. We had so much free time together that his trips out to see friends and family didn't feel like they were eating into precious us-time. It was sustainable and effective, and assuming he stays at his job we'll probably do the same next year.

Opting not to interact with friends and family wasn't the grown-up or healthy choice, but I'm still having a hard time with people—harder now than a year ago. I'm not sadder, I'm tired—a thorough and extended tired. I have griefprocessing.exe running in the background, slowing the rest of the brain-computer; but my brain doesn't have the uhhhhh RAM, I guess, to run bigger programs like family.exe or activeprocessing.exe. My choices are, as always, easier unhealthy-ish choice vs. harder and actively damaging but more responsible choice, and as usual I went with the former.

I'm super behind on end-of-year media wrap-ups (writing my own, but also reading others's!), because I've been with Devon instead of my computer. But I'll get there.

I'm hardly the only one to say this, but the joy of Untitled Goose Game is that it's the "be naughty" equivalent of "do murder" in most games: I'm not supposed to do this IRL, it's probably best that I don't do this IRL :(, but it's very cathartic to do the thing in lovingly-rendered detail in game space. Anyway, I really enjoyed it.

* * *

I'm sorry that 100% of my updates have been book reviews, and that there have been so many of them.

I ran into something of a wall in processing life. I had to dump some stimuli (RIP Shakespeare project, trips to see my family, talking to almost anyone ever) & meanwhile delved deep into other stimuli of the self-discovery/-actualization and repairing my relationship with my partner after seven million years of stress varieties. Arguably these activities are also intense work, but they're less taxing and more indulgent (because sometimes they mean Acquiring Physical Goods) and just ... easier to process, especially while interfacing with the rest of the world is too hard.

So all my time has been Devon Time or Me Time or Quiet Time—

—and then I realized that I'd read [as of drafting this, numbers have since shifted] ~260 books this year with ~95 days left in the year, which means that at just over a book a day I could hit my arbitrary and ridiculous goal of 365 books in 2019. I was on track for that a few months ago, but then stopped reading Animorphs and started reading novel-length SF/F as well as playing video games and stuff.

So I went back to shamelessly inflating my numbers via children's books and manga, and now 365 is again become an achievable goal. I like it because it's (for me) not tenable, so I will never compare another year to this year & maybe learn the more general lesson that statistics are silly. Given the upcoming Macmillan and Blackstone embargoes, I imagine that 2020 will be a whole new shitshow for library users and I can only guess how it'll impact my reading—maybe it will be a year of decades-old doorstoppers to spite both publishers and statistics while avoiding holds.

I am meanwhile mostly caught up on writing reviews! ...I am still very behind on posting reviews! Between that and this rock I'm hiding under, that's all I've had the energy to post.

One adventure in apartment living:

I woke to weird splashing sound to find that the inside of a windowsill was dripping because the upstairs neighbors had a leaky tub. Two weeks of ~daily maintenance visits + two fans and one massive, incredibly hot dehumidifier followed. Needing to be here to cat-wrangle for maintenance plus heat plus noise made for a lot of sleepless anxiety. (I've relied a lot on white noise to fight anxiety, but the ultra-fan combo was a smothering, anxiety-inducing sort of white noise that I didn't even know was possible.)

One weekend after the bathroom was rendered usable, the other bathroom had a backed-up shower. It was resolved that same weekend by a very-satisfying/-gross hair clog removal. But! please will things calm down for like five minutes!

Our major takeaway from all this is that communication is hard (we never seemed to get warning phone calls or time windows, and Dev had to make a number of trips to the office) but the complex moves quickly on structurally damaging things and the actual maintenance crew are personable and considerate. Forever grateful for the maintenance guy that was actively angry at the neighbors, who he suspected should have seen the leak (I'm sticking strictly to no assumptions/no ill will, if only to avoid second-guessing everything they do from now on, but the man had opinions), and told me "oh, this started a week ago? it must feel like a month, with us coming in and out all the time." I appreciate the reminder that no one wants to deal with this sort of thing, although my (not-)dealing was absolutely impacted by being big-time crazy and therefore overwhelmed by the need to masquerade as a grown adult for any length of time.

One victory in apartment living:

We reached critical (anti-)mass in our unpacking to just a few boxes and a few more donation piles, which gave us incredible impetus to finish sorting and actually take in donations and buy our last storage shelves and just be done. There's a part of me that wants to live in the domestic clutter of a Miyazaki film, and a center of me that has a lot of anxiety re: not having things and is hugely emotionally attached to specific things I do have, and part of me that is weighed upon by possessions and liberated by space. Devon comes from a family of hoarders, and so—at least while recovering from that, and determining how he wants to operate his own spaces—has a distinct "miles of open, empty carpet" aesthetic. I think we're finding a good balance: functional, no obsessive minimalism, but empty—clean—so much room to breathe.

The cats love it. Cat furniture is on our to-buy list, and an actual cat tree will reclaim some of that freed space. But open spaces have transformed August into a new beast who sprints the length of the house. There's a garden window reserved for growing sun-warmed cats. They have things to look at out windows, but more than that have safety and space to roam and play in.

Adventures elsewise:

I have a deep ambivalence over summer, because I hate sun and heat—but the summer's ubiquitous, intense* sun and heat create evocative atmospheres and memories. But my usual fear/anticipation has been colored this year by headaches. I've always had light-/heat-/tension-/dehydration-/stress-/exhaustion-headaches, and this feels like a combination of all of the above; and my usual remedies chip away, but nothing eases it completely. We're looking into blackout curtains; in the meanwhile, it's curtailing what I can do, like use the computer or my eyes at all TBH. I'm grateful for audiobooks, but frustrated. I've fallen behind on book reviews, personal correspondence, journaling.

* In as far as "intense" applies the Pacific Northwest; insofar as a PNW resident views any heat or sun at all as intense.

I've been watching a lot of JessiMew's LPs to wind down when my eyes/head feel better, especially in the evenings. I've always enjoyed her videos, but their gentleness is working particularly well for me just now.

Current Music: Saika - Rabpit

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