what i'm reading:
L + ratio + no life + not caught a single dub + no longer human + I snatch small twitching things out of the undergrowth to devour their flesh and viscera still raw, as the last few pumps of hot metallic blood spurt feebly in my face.
-- Sam Kriss, "In my zombie era"
I basically agree with the sentiment it's because ur on that damn phone all the time but what annoys me about Kriss specifically nocking his arrows for the misters beasts of the world is that they're such easy targets. I'd like to see kriss commentate on, say, the esoteric paganism of niche lolcow Baron von Helton, or the cultural stranglehold of tok tok conspiracies. at least make some snarky ironic commentary on trump's foreign policy while citing the writing of 17th century hermetic monks. give us something, kriss.
popular culture has always been deeply stupid. i heard a coworker complain one time about an Elvis descendant getting a paycheck for elvis's image being used on The Masked Singer or whatever. NEWS FLASH: Elvis is the same thing as The Masked Singer: deeply uncritical, unscrupulously mercenary, comparable to a homogeneous puree served in hospice. it's below you to acknowledge that it's below you.
anyway. it's a fun read, he's just such a boomer.
what i'm listening to:
Vísur Vatnsenda-Rósu
I've had Bjork's full discography on my harddrive since, like, 8th grade, and for some reason this track was labeled as a One Day remix. And I got like, 2/3rds of the way through before getting suspicious that it wasn't a One Day remix.
what i'm watching:
exhuma (2024)
a really fresh take on folk horror: modern Korean shamans negotiating fees with clients and enlisting their feng shui geomancer friends, who work day jobs consulting real estate developers, for a gig... until the plot resolves and there's still an hour of runtime left. then it's just tedious and uninspired.
(NEW) what i'm playing
most of the time what i'm playing is solitaire. Working full time gets in the way of being a hashtag gaymer. but i've returned to games in search of the respite afforded me by the sleep-like oblivion some induce.
baba is you
baba is you is hard. i just said that thing about sleep-like oblivion but baba is not really affording me it. but it's something to do with my hands while i listen to music or podcasts. idk.
Ediction
The gods are all liars. Worse, they're just people. Fallible and filthy just like the rest of us
i've never been into genre fiction. i don't particularly care about spectacle and aesthetics of castles and dragons or space ships and aliens. i've always been more interested in things at the level of words and sentences and the situations the characters are put in. that being said, genre is a neutral framework. prose and scenarios can be helped or hindered by being framed within a given genre.
"ediction" is an example of genre and scenario collaborating beautifully. it's a character character study in a fantasy world that produces strange characters-- but not so strange as to be alien. i kept thinking of Vulcanizadora (dir. Joel Portrykus, 2024) while playing because it's essentially the same synopsis: two guys take a journey in unusual circumstances that they don't intend to return from. in one the strangeness in inherent in the fantasy setting; in the other it's the heightening of character idiosyncrasies. both tell very emotionally grounded stories.
i can appreciate the dilemma ediction puts before us; brought back to life, should the protagonist choose to die for a(n arguably) righteous cause, or live a life that is simultaneously full of both suffering and possibility? but i've always been a pro-extinction kinda guy. if you're gonna put a scenario before me along the lines of SOMA (2015) where you have to make a choice between living a struggling half-life in a fraught world or dying forever, i'm going to choose dying forever.
i really appreciate the dev blogs the creators wrote digging into to some of the shaders and VFX they wrote for Ediction. the level of thoughtfulness and attention to detail they've put into Ediction makes me even more intrigued for their long-form VN WHODUNNIT?, the devlog of which speaks for itself.
something i liked:
piracy
I'd like to say I'm taking some principled stand against the horrible swedish homonculus that has singled-handedly disintegrated westerners' relationship with music and his recent and unsurprising step into funneling his millions in unpayed royalties to putting putting ai girlfriends in bombs-- but i'm not. I'm just selfish. The cracked apps I was relying on keep getting patched and I'm bored fighting it. So I've spun up Navidrome and soulseek containers and I'm working on getting an earlier GNU-licensed version of filebot up so I can automatically organize my soulseek downloads. i'm in my mp3 era.
spotify was convenient for me quickly listening to new music. I do not do my discovery on spotify; i don't listen to their curated playlists, and i don't particularly give a shit about wrapped.
something i hated:
that thing semis do on the highway where they drive right next to each other for miles and miles and block all the cars behind them from passing
runner up is sports cars that rush up ahead of you so they can tailgate said semis. what are we doing, people.
a picture: