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Greetings from San Francisco, where I'm attending a Work Thing. But I fucked off from that this morning to hit up Lands End and then hike the California Coastal Trail to the Golden Gate Bridge. (Then, alas, I had to return to Work Thing.)

Shout-out to the public restroom at Fort Winfield Scott for being immaculately clean.

Genshin Impact (2020-, PC) -- Went through the 6.3 patch, because I'm going to be traveling for most of this week and wanted to give myself a fighting chance of finishing this year's Lantern Rite before it disappears into smoke in six days. (Although, now that I've dipped a toe in this year's Lantern Rite: hmmm, so far I am underwhelmed!)

Genshin Impact 6.3 A Traveler on a Winter's Night

I largely liked 6.3, though it did the exact same annoying thing that 6.1 did and straps you into Cutscene Masterpiece Theater for multiple hours of playing time. Still don't love that move, Genshin! However, it does this under the ambitious gambit of removing the player's character from the field of play and having most of the plot happen with the supporting cast. I enjoyed that. It is very dreary playing The Single Most Important Person In Teyvat all the time, and it's nice to see other characters get to steer the story for a while.

( slightly sweaty attempt to explain a lot of baroque world lore to players who routinely button-mash through cutscenes )

Had to do a Professional Thing the other night, which meant I spent the day at work wearing a black blazer, black trousers, and a button-up shirt. Every time I encountered a colleague, they did a double-take and hissed, Are you wearing a suit?!?

I mean. Sure. In the loosest possible definition of "suit." Sure. Every article of clothing I am wearing cost $20 or less and was purchased separately, but sure, a suit, sure.

And I was initially annoyed at their obvious surprise at my attire, and then I remembered that they had all seen me last week at our official division meeting wearing jeans and a T-shirt with a skeleton explaining IF IT SUCKS...HIT DA BRICKS, and I thought, ah, okay, fine.

In other news, I have a series of accelerating work deadlines for the next four weeks, and I'm very grumpy about them. But then! Mid-March! A blissful reprieve! Just gotta hold on until mid-March!

ME: [foolishly] "2026 is the year I really take work-life balance seriously!"

WORK: [amused chuckle]

Life Is Strange (2015, PC) -- Beat it! It took me about twelve hours total. Thanks, I hated it.

Okay, I didn't hate all of it. It makes some ambitious narrative swings: admirable. It does a really nice job with the character of Chloe: vibrant, original, memorable, fallible. And I liked how it handled Max friendzoning Warren. Maybe there are different outcomes if you're meaner to him, but I had Max politely reject all of Warren's overtures, and he took those rejections in stride and was friendly and supportive to the bitter end. What a good little bro (at least in my playthrough).

I also genuinely liked the ending and how it presents Max's final choice. Her time-traveling powers aren't for fixing problems, the game argues at the last minute. They're for creating a week-long temporal tree-fort. After squandering her precious life (not contacting Chloe when she moves back, hiding behind her camera to avoid meaningful connections with her classmates, creating selfie after selfie in Narcissus-like self-absorption), the universe generously hands her a temporary reprieve to hang out with her soulmate and her hometown one last time.

Après nous, le déluge.

( Guy who has only seen Riverdale, experiencing his second story: Getting a lot of 'Riverdale' vibes from this )

My employer has finally unveiled their months-in-the-planning reorganization scheme -- and, miraculously, my particular division is untouched and the day-to-day work of my colleagues and me will (apparently, knock on wood) continue unchanged. We're astonished but relieved.

Terry Pratchett, The Truth (2000) -- William de Worde single-handedly invents the concept of mid-twentieth-century journalism just when scandal and conspiracy threaten the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork.

I thought this was great: lots of obvious jokes riffing on His Girl Friday and All the President's Men, but that's a vein of humor that is exactly my cup of tea. I particularly adored Otto von Chriek, a vampire-photographer who disintegrates screaming into dust every time he uses a flash-bulb equivalent. I can tell that Pratchett also adored Otto, because the character appears in way more scenes in The Truth than the book necessarily required. But I don't care! Otto's great! Pratchett was correct to shoehorn him into the book at every opportunity!

Josephine Tey, Brat Farrar (1949) -- A young man pretends to be the long-vanished heir of a small English estate. His con gets more complicated when he suspects that the original heir was secretly murdered. Symbolism ensues.

Brat Farrar's premise has been reused and adapted one million times. Mary Stewart's best novel, The Ivy Tree, is a riff on it, and probably every long-running network procedural has done at least one episode devoted to a Brat-like imposter discovering that they've infiltrated the household of a killer. The strength of Tey's novel has less to do with the premise (which itself is borrowed from the 19th-century Roger Tichborne case) and more to do with the growing tension our protagonist feels as he tries to square his precarious scam with solving a murder (and avoiding being murdered himself). That intensifying psychological pressure is well-portrayed.

On the other hand, I think Tey spoons a little too much pathos and virtue over the eponymous Brat. From the very beginning, he feels so conflicted and regretful about his scam that he might as well be wearing a placard that says ACTUALLY I'M A GOOD GUY DEEP DOWN. I suspect this would be a better novel if Brat were a chillier and more calculating customer at the novel's start. It would make his antagonistic relationship with Simon a lot more interesting, and it would render his gradual embrace of his adoptive family a lot more effective. Basically, I want a noir-y hard-boiled Brat Farrar, please. (And, while we're wishing for things, a better ending as well. After a slowly ponderous pace through most of its plot, the ending arrives abruptly and ties off every single plot-thread with mechanical efficiency. It's as if Tey got tired of writing the book and hurried through the last quarter as quickly as she could.)

texts with my sister, a play in one act:

I did not want to go into work today and do my little tasks -- and yet, I did! I'm God's strongest soldier. I deserve a cookie.

Life Is Strange (2015, PC) -- Finished Episode Three. I don't exactly remember why I bailed mid-game the first time I played Life Is Strange a decade ago, but playing it now, I am taken aback by the clumsiness of the dialogue. The game wants to be extremely reactive to your choices, so characters are constantly referencing and reacting to things you did earlier. And yet, the game is also bolted into a pre-scripted plot, so characters also need to say certain things, regardless of your choices, just to move you along from Point A to Point B. Thus, the choice-affected dialogue is interwoven line-by-line with the plot-required dialogue -- which, in theory, could be cool, but Life Is Strange implements it badly, disorientingly, and nonsensically.

One minute, Chloe is ebullient about Max's return and then, without missing a beat, she's berating Max for being a bad friend. One minute, Max is boldly excited about breaking into the school, and then, the next moment, she's sniveling and whining about trespassing. Characters casually mention surprising information and then act shocked about that same surprising information thirty seconds later. And I still don't understand what mystery Max thinks she is investigating in regards to Rachel Amber and Kate Marsh. Life Is Strange should have scripted out much longer scene-chunks for each diverging branch of the plot-tree; the game's system of micro-bursts of contextual references dropped in the middle of conversations make the characters all talk like mercurial amnesiacs. Aside from simply creating a bad experience, this mechanic also highlights how little choice you-the-player have over the game. No matter what options you choose, the same basic things are going to happen. (Oh, you talked someone out of committing suicide? Don't worry, everyone is going to react with the same degree of devastation as if someone had really died!) No matter how the other characters view Max, they're going to perform the same basic actions with her. They'll just be weird and emotionally unregulated while they do so. Feels bad, man!

My sister, who has played the game before, warned me during Sibling Chat that the game takes an unexpected tonal turn in the last two episodes. I'm excited to see if this warning is in regards to the final twist of Episode Three (oh boy, I can only assume the game will be respectful and nuanced about disability representation!) or something else entirely.

Ah, yes, the Cool Zone.

Life is Strange (2015, PC) -- A teenage girl discovers that she can rewind time and reunites with an estranged childhood friend in ~~Twin Peaks~~ ~~Gravity Falls~~ Arcadia Bay.

Another installment of this series is about to be released, and fans on the Internet are concerned about how it's going to handle the starkly divergent choices made at the end of the first Life is Strange game -- and I thought, Oh, right! I played some of that first game! I should go back and play the whole thing before the new game comes out and retcons everything.

According to Steam, I played the first two episodes of Life is Strange in August 2016 and then played no further. Replaying the first episode today, I found that I remembered everything pretty well, meaning that I breezed through all the "difficult choices" without really thinking or agonizing over any of them. This is probably the correct mindset for playing the game! I was also reminded of all the criticism that the game received at release for its "how do you do fellow kids" slang, because the diction in this ten-year-old game seems twenty-to-thirty years out of date. I think Chloe's dialogue is probably the most defensible of the bunch -- I knew a fair number of twenty-something PNW stoners in 2015, and they did tend to talk like creatures from another time -- but Max and Victoria and the other Blackwell characters often dip into the same register, and that's a lot more jarring. I suspect this can be chalked up to "most of the people who made this game were French."

Similarly, I find the setting (ostensibly a private school in coastal Oregon) kind of weird. Blackwell Academy exclusively runs a one-year program for high-school seniors? (This has got to be a weird Parisian misunderstanding of how US secondary school works, right?) Why do the student boarders at this academy have lockers next to their classrooms when their on-campus dormitories are five minutes away? Why is the big sport American football at this PNW private school? (It's not impossible, but soccer, tennis, swimming, and track would be the more likely contenders. Also, why would a one-year program have...any sports whatsoever? Does Blackwell Academy just eat shit every time they play another school?) Why does the game so frantically emphasize that these high-school seniors are all DEFINITELY 18+? (I mean. Presumably it's so the characters can do drugs etc without Square Enix worrying about legal issues. But also, come on.)

But whatever! I think the first episode does a good job setting up protagonist Max as a semi-weaselly voyeur, and I think it does a great job instantly establishing Chloe as 100% more interesting and exciting than anyone else in Max's life.

Road Trip to the End of the World (2025, PC) -- Joined by a talking fish in overalls, a young woman drives across the United States to crash the wedding of her ex-best friend.

This Ren'py visual novel, a thesis project from Alex M. Lee as part of her MFA at SVA, is short and polished and free to play. It took me about an hour to experience from start to finish, and that brevity is both a strength and a weakness. On one hand: a perfectly self-contained one-hour game, we love to see it! On the other hand, perhaps due to the thesis-project demands of MUST DEMONSTRATE ALL PORTFOLIO STRENGTHS HEREIN, the game appears anxious about cramming in a full character arc for its protagonist. This means that she is maybe overly self-actualized and speaks in the idiom of self-help therapy TikToks -- but just when I was starting to frown at all the epiphanies being awkwardly vocalized, there was a Guy Fieri jump-scare joke that had me howling with laughter. So, on the whole: a good game!

Primordia (2012, PC) -- Beat it! Took me about six hours with copious reference to walkthroughs. Got the "good" ending and then went back to see the other endings, which were impressively creative and nihilistic. My opinion remains unchanged: I liked the characters and plot but was underwhelmed by the game's design.

People We Meet On Vacation (2026) -- I thought the original novel was so much fun, but this adaptation lacks the book's carefully constructed tension of watching our friends-in-flashback obliviously approach a mysterious estrangement in the present. Also, it's not as funny as the book? The movie really doubles down on the soapy elements of the story, but the Emily Henry fans are here for banter and quips. This may be the first film I've ever watched and thought, This would have really benefited from some voiceover narration.

My favorite mean Letterboxd reviews of the film:

they dressed her like an elder millennial but we persist

2 hour long delaney rowe instagram reel

Every gen gets their own When Harry Met Sally (derogatory).

Primordia (2012, PC) -- In a post-apocalyptic wasteland inhabited by robots, Horatio Nullbuilt and his companion, Crispin Horatiobuilt, fend off predators and scavengers while studying the Gospel of Man.

This is one of those games where I can say, Ah, these are deliberate and carefully chosen design choices by the creators, but they're also deliberate, careful choices that I do not enjoy. This point-and-click game follows the genre formula: you wander through static scenes and click on objects to pick them up and sometimes combine them with other objects to solve puzzles. In the case of Primordia, the objects themselves are not always visually obvious, especially since the color palette of the game is brown-on-brown, and it's easy to miss a small dark brown block lying on a background that is a slightly different tone of brown. I appreciate the commitment to aesthetics -- visually, the game is really striking! -- but forcing the player to carefully check every single pixel of each scene is a throwback to a much older 90s-style of point-and-click game. It's not an aspect of the genre for which I feel nostalgia.

Similarly, though all the puzzles have logical solutions (no Monkey Island absurdity here!), those solutions are not particularly intuitive, especially when it comes to combining electronic parts to set up different kinds of computer systems. Even in the early hours of playing, I was often confused about the specific "thing" I was supposed to be making to advance forward in the plot. The game has anticipated the possibility of player confusion -- your companion Crispin offers hints when you click on him, and Horatio gives heavily suggestive explanations for all the objects you add to your personal inventory -- but also I think the game is simply comfortable with a degree of player "friction" and frustration that is out-of-fashion these days. For example, the game differentiates between you-Horatio trying to do something with an object and you-Horatio trying to make the ever-present Crispin do something with an object. I'd argue that this is an unnecessary complication -- click on the thingamabob, and if either of your two characters can interact with it, have them interact with it! don't make me duplicate attempts of the same basic action!! -- but it's clear the game-makers had specific reasons for designing the system this way. It doubles the ways in which the player can interact with the environment, and the range of possibilities probably excites a lot of real point-and-click aficionados. I don't think this is a choice borne out of developer inexperience or clumsiness. It's just that I, personally, don't admire that particular school of game design. I'm primarily interested in the find-and-combine "puzzles" in point-and-click games as narrative funnels -- to accomplish A, the player had to experience B and C first, thereby establishing coherence in a nonlinear story -- and not because I find the puzzles themselves interesting.

Anyway, this is a long way of saying: after playing for three hours, I don't think I like this game, but it's not really the game's fault. Also, I think the characters and writing are great. I am still invested in learning more about the amnesia-locked mystery that lies before/behind Horatio, so I'll keep plugging on.

I have several things that absolutely must be finished by Monday, and I dealt with those inflexible looming deadlines by once again downloading Inscryption and beating all twelve levels in Kaycee's Mod.

Such triumph, such victory.

I have once again uninstalled Inscryption.

Yesterday was a long, weird day of travel. At the airport, somebody accidentally grabbed my checked luggage and left the airport with it, and tracking them down was a saga. (I successfully did it, though, because I am resourceful and ingenious.)

TRON: Ares (2025) -- Watched on a plane. The soundtrack by Nine Inch Nails is great, and for the first hour, it's possible to just zone out and watch lots of red special effects set to a thumping synth beat. Then, midway through the movie, our two leads have a normal human conversation in a car, and it just kills the movie dead. Not even the return of NIN or red lights can fix it. This movie would have been much better if nobody spoke. I look forward to reading the future breakdown of why Disney or any of the myriad producers thought, "You know, a third TRON movie, that'll make bank!"

I am, however, a sucker for Greta Lee, and I did snort-laugh at her chirpily sarcastic delivery of "This is my boyfriend, Ares!"

F1 (2025) -- Watched on a plane. I know nothing about Formula 1, but I do think it's very funny that this film is so committed to its Sports Movie Clichés that there's a whole subplot about a driver who has gotten too distracted by social media and sponsorship deals and thus forgotten What Formula 1 Is Really About. (Most sports films can at least gesture to children playing the sport in question and their authentic and non-commercialized relationship to that pastime. But you cannot make that case for racing cars.)

According to this movie, the key to winning car races is to crash deliberately into other cars. Formula 1 seems only one step removed from a bloodsport.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (2025, PS5) -- Thirty hours in, just finished Act II. I thought the first hour or so of the game was pretty clumsy, but once we got to the Continent, things picked up, and once Verso started Verso-ing all over the place, things took some unexpected emotional turns. I was especially delighted by how the twist at the beginning of Act III was executed. My siblings and I could see the basic concept coming from a long ways off, but we weren't prepared for how nastily funny the game was going to be about it. (Clea!)

( spoiler cut )

Anyway, I have now left the place where the Playstation 5 lives, so the trolley problems of Act III will have to wait until this summer.

Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves (2000) -- Charles Kinbote hears about The Blair Witch Project secondhand. Maybe the real House of Leaves was the friends we made along the way.

I found this cult horror classic somewhat underwhelming: a lot of energy and innovation in service of some threadbare epiphanies. (I was reminded, repeatedly, of the similarly deflating experience of playing Blue Prince last year.) I got briefly excited, early on, when the Borges references started; the idea of an incompletely erased Nemesis slowly re-emerging in a mutable text-labyrinth was cool! But then the book wanted to deconstruct that idea as well, and a great weariness settled upon me.

I think many people who love this book love all the puzzles and codes. This is demonstrated, I'd argue, by how many people seem to prefer the graphomaniac academic satire of Zampanò to the footnoted exploits of Johnny Truant, a Linkin Park song-lyric made life. Because I'm built different, I liked the Mountain Dew energy of Johnny Truant, who repeatedly signals his unreliability and evasion via his belligerently insane Penthouse Letters. In contrast, the Zampanò stuff is a series of jokes about a now-mostly-dead strain of critical analysis, and my patience for that is limited. Some of the puzzles in House of Leaves have effective and meaningful payoffs -- the Morse code chapter; Johnny's mother's encrypted message -- but a lot of them seem like weak attempts to imitate Pale Fire's pyrotechnics.

Sentimental Value (2025) -- Long and roomy and sweet. I watched it with my mother as we drank gin-and-tonics in the living room of the house I grew up in.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (2025, PS5) -- MIME TIME. 12 hours played, early-ish in Act II. Some of the writing in this game is Not Subtle, but I enjoy the whimsy in the art direction. Esquie is an amazing twist on the traditional JRPG airship.

Time to reflect on 2025: a weird year.

( 2025: a choice between focusing on professional or personal pursuits, and the professional needs won out )

In conclusion: my work-life balance in 2025 was not ideal, though (due to external factors), I don't think there's any way I could have fixed that. I suspect 2026 is going to have the same external factors, so I guess I should strive to be more intentional about how I spend my time and energy. (But 2027! That's where I'm a viking!)

And now it's time for: the customary end-of-year post.

Movies: I watched 40 movies this year, compared to 50 last year.

The four best new-to-me movies I saw this year were:

Anora (2024)
Conclave (2024)
Decision to Leave (2022)
In Bruges (2008)

Books: I read 50 books for leisure this year, compared to 51 books read last year. This year's best discovery: Robert Jackson Bennett.

The five best books I read this year were:

John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (2018)
Emily Henry, Book Lovers (2022)
Heather Fawcett, Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries (2023)
Terry Pratchett, Hogfather (1996)
Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Blades (2016)

Video Games: I played 32 games this year, compared to playing 16 games last year. That's...a lot more! It's mostly due to chugging through a lot of 2-to-4-hour games in the second half of the year, but that's okay. I hope I play a lot more 2-to-4-hour games in 2026.

( My 2025 Video Games )

The three best video games I played this year were:

Chants of Sennaar
The World Ends With You
The Blackwell Epiphany

In conclusion: I feel okay about my media consumption for 2025. I am surprised and pleased that I maintained the same level of reading despite not-tracking my reading for the year. (I entirely credit the public library, which conferred just enough urgency to keep me reading at a steady clip.)

I also resolved to watch every Coen Bros. movie in 2025, which I...did not do. Sorry, Coen Bros! I think they're great film-makers, and their comedies are a delight, but making space in my life to watch their tragedies turned out to be an insurmountable obstacle in 2025. I might tackle this goal again some time in the future, if I ever arrange a year of blissful repose, but I think 2026 is going to be just as stressful as 2025, and so I don't think I can hack it. Oh well!

Resolutions: Gonna take things easy. I'd like to maintain (or slightly exceed) my book and movie numbers for 2026. I doubt I will complete the same number of video games, but as long as I play at least 15, I'll consider it a good pace. I'm not going to aspire to read/watch/play anything particular, because I don't think my 2026 is going to lend itself to that kind of regimentation. So I'll just focus on quantity: 3-5 books & movies a month, along with 1-2 games.

Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Blades (2016) -- Grudgingly, retired general Turyin Mulaghesh agrees to travel to the conquered city of Voortyashtan and investigate a missing spy. While there, she runs into numerous old friends and foes while trying to figure out the long-gone goddess of death and motherhood who once ruled Voortyashtan.

This sequel to City of Stairs promotes supporting character Mulaghesh to protagonist and brings back the character of Sigurd, aka "Brock Samson Wearing A Viking Helmet." It's fun! I think parts are a little indulgent; the conceit of the whole book is that Voortya is a seemingly paradoxical entity with a secret coherence, but the book spends a lot of time circling that one idea with diminishing returns. (Although, to the book's credit, it circles this one idea at regular intervals, so City of Blades does not suffer from quite the same pacing issues as City of Stairs, though there's still a LET ME EXPLAIN EVERYTHING TO YOU sequence at the end.) Additionally, for a book with a lot of complicated and satisfyingly complex characters, the nominal villains are notably one-dimensional. But whatever! I think this book succeeds a lot more than it fails, and I was impressed by how much it was willing to let Mulaghesh's allies suffer, fail, and die.

The Lincoln Lawyer (2011) -- A totally sturdy and totally unsurprising courtroom thriller, though I did enjoy that the climax involves the defense attorney triumphing over BOTH the opposing prosecutor AND his own client. Matthew McConaughey is really such a fun actor and an asset to every movie he's in.

Inside Man (2006) -- A small, perfect movie. One of my desert-island films.

Clear and Present Danger (1994) -- This is a weird historical time capsule, both of a particular political moment (right-wing post-mortem of Iran-Contra) and of the genre of mid-90s political thrillers. This is the first time I've seen the film, and I was most startled by the contortions that the film goes through to give its desk-job-bureaucrat hero repeated paper-thin reasons to travel from Washington to Colombia and have ~action sequences.~

Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion (2001) -- I originally read this in 2006, and I've been listening to the audiobook, off and on, for the last six months. (Thank you, library system!) I liked the book in 2006; at the time, it seemed like a refreshing epic-fantasy inversion of all the huge doorstopper 90s fantasies (Wheel of Time, Game of Thrones, etc). Listening to The Curse of Chalion this year, it now seems like a relic of a past genre moment: sturdy and steady and kind of ponderous and over-explanatory. On the other hand, that does make it a solid audiobook to be perpetually re-checking out between other library books! You will never be confused about what is happening or why it's happening! Somebody is always taking the reader gently by the hand to offer exposition!

I can now appreciate that the book is a fantasy remixing of Isabel I's 1474 ascension to the throne of Castile, and in that key, it's pretty fun pseudo-historical interpretation (and, maybe wisely, it does not even try to recreate the actual Isabel's particular program of religious consolidation and imperial expansion).

The Thursday Murder Club (2025) -- If you had asked me before today if I had strong feelings about the THURSDAY MURDER CLUB book series, I would have laughed at you. And yet! I guess I do, because I thought that this was a shockingly disappointing adaptation that fails to capture any of the weirdness or humor from the books. (Also, can't believe they did Bogdan like that!) The casting, however, is great; Helen Mirren is particularly excellent.

Battleship (2012) -- This remains such a confusing combination of bottom-drawer concept (Gen X board-game meets Michael Bay) and a cast and crew that is slightly too good for the material. Like, it's not terrible? Even though every part of it is deeply unnecessary?

Made the long trek home, and now I am back in the bosom of the fam: watching terrible movies with my father, running errands with my mother, playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 with my siblings. Our sibling chat right now is just variations on "MIME TIME?"

The Fantastic 4: First Steps (2025) -- Watched on a plane. This film aspires to an overly earnest and retro corniness, in the same mode as Gunn's SUPERMAN, but nobody apparently told the Marvel script-doctors, As a result, there's all this tired background banter that is written as quippy ("Well, THAT happened") and then filmed/recorded flatly and confusingly ("Well, that...happened..."). Whereas James Gunn over in SUPERMAN knows how to film a corny joke set-up and frame a corny punchline!

The one memorable thing about the film is Vanessa Kirby's Sue Storm, who gets the most interesting things to do in the middle of the film. Giving birth...in space! Screaming "KILL HER!" in the midst of contractions!! Nothing else in the movie is as weird and surprising as that mid-movie scene, including Kirby's increasingly rote character in the second half of the film.

Sinners (2025) -- Watched on a plane. Takes some wild swings but most of them connect. I hope Michael B. Jordan and Ryan Coogler make one million more movies together, hitting every cinematic genre along the way.

ME: "Oh boy! It's the end of the year! It's going to be super simple to wrap up everything at work in a timely manner!"

WORK: "lol. lmao even."

Anyway, I've consumed a truly lethal amount of caffeine this week and averaged about three hours of sleep a night, but I think I am actually done with everything that needs to be finished before the end of the year. (In related news, I was grimly mulling over something today, and then I thought, Self, you've averaged three hours of sleep a night this week! You are not in your right mind right now! You don't need to re-evaluate a single thing in your life today! Today is a day for head empty, just vibes!)

Wake Up Dead Man (2025) -- This is a deliberate throwback to a very retro style of murder mystery, and I enjoyed it on the same terms I enjoy Agatha Christie novels (i.e. dumb as hell if you think about it too long, but very satisfying in the moment). It's also a piss-take on a Passion Play, which is fun if you're familiar with the format and usual characters.

Unfortunately, it has a distractingly weird portrayal of American Catholicism, complete with a priest who has apparently inherited the same parish as his grandfather? (Even aside from the priestly family, that kind of appointment would be pretty weird within the ecclesiastical bureaucracy.) And then we have that same priest delivering all these off-the-cuff fire-and-brimstone sermons from the pulpit, which is not...really the vibe in the Catholic liturgical calendar but which can be the vibe in the Wild West of evangelical Christianity. Surprise: director Rian Johnson is not Catholic but was raised in an 80s evangelical household. Yeah, man, me too, but despite that, I'm aware the Venn diagram of Catholic and evangelical institutional cultures does not have a ton of overlap.

Actually, I suspect that Johnson wanted to replicate a very typical kind of English mid-century murder mystery, which necessarily involves the Anglican Church. But there's no way you can transfer a murder mystery set in an Anglican vicarage to the United States; there's literally nothing in the pantheon of U.S. Christian institutions that equates to that specific host of associations. I can see why Catholicism might have seemed like an acceptable substitute at first glance, but the movie is so unnecessarily wrong about such little stuff that it kept breaking my suspension of disbelief.

On the other hand, Josh O'Connor excels in the lead role and nails the very specific personality of every young Catholic priest I've met in my life. So sometimes the movie achieves a moment of real, lived reality, and sometimes it's just lazy and generic and incurious.

Mass Effect (2007, PC) -- Beat it! It took me about 22 hours, and I did pretty much everything. I followed a mostly renegade path, which was unpleasant and sometimes lazily integrated with the game's plot. On the other hand, I liked that the game's writing doubled down on xenophobia and amorality in the grand finale, especially in Anderson's concluding speech about humanity taking control amidst a power vacuum. Gross but appropriate! I sacrificed Ashley at Virmire -- even though I think Ashley's character arc over the whole trilogy is fun and a lot more interesting that the stuff going on with Kaidan. (But, alas, I sacrificed Kaidan during my first playthrough, so I thought it was only fair to sacrifice Ashley this time.) Saved Wrex, of course, as he remains the standout character in the cast. I romanced Liara, somewhat reluctantly. The romances in this game are pretty bad, and I salute my younger player-self's purity of purpose in refusing to romance anyone at all. On the whole, I had a fine time, but Mass Effect has not aged particularly well. Its innovations have all been appropriated and refined in other games (not least among them its own sequel), and so now it just seems kind of clunky and hammy in its execution. I kind of think...Dragon Age is the better Bioware series?

Inscryption (2021, PC) -- After I uninstalled Mass Effect, I did not want to start a new game, but I did want to enter a game-playing fugue state. Enter, stage left: Kaycee's Mod from Inscryption, which is basically an endless version of the Act One card game. It took me 21 failed runs before I managed to beat the first iteration of the game, so everything is clearly going great. As a vehicle for dissociation, sacrificing squirrel cards has entered a pleasantly Tetris-like zone for me.

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Page generated Feb. 23rd, 2026 07:44 am

robots with guns reading proust

with a pen inherited from a goose and Homer

Recent Entries

Everyone hates Petrarch

when youre an adult youre like i need more poisons ASAP

April 1805. Napoleon has looksmaxxed Europe.

because i adore the air bud movies but crave violence

naps or little packets of crackers

self-appointed visionaries doing donuts in the mud

a dog that has bitten one too many times and can't go to the dog park anymore

all the belgian whistles

Gen Z Reacts To Dreadstone

Qué grande Jeff Puentes

double lobster claw clasp

McDonald’s Brings Back Beloved Snack Rat

biscoff as the hardtack of the sky

necesito saberlo TODO sobre eso y no tengo tiempo de HIMBESTIGAR

2025 in Review

Cultural Consumption in 2025

ACAB includes Sex Police

like a spartan fucked a bionicle

the grinch is a sometimes food

velociraptors were built like poodles