Week wrap-up - Sept 22
Here's what I've been doing/finding online this week!
Stress Killer - Leon Phal
Been listening to this jazz album, which I heard about from Aura Triolo. It rules. Can't say that it actually kills all my stress but it's got a lot of the right type of energy.
You may also like this weird music video of one of Leon Phal's other songs, which is basically a pretty interesting music visualizer set in a scrolling 3D scene. Very much "jazz has discovered the unreal engine".
Nightmare rhythm game video - ADOFAI - 1234 Overclocked by Cansol
I was impressed by this work-in-progress video of a player's nightmarish custom level for the rhythm game A Dance of Fire and Ice. The level is set to an extremely long, rhythmically complex song called 1234 Overclocked, and it's one of the scariest rhythm game videos I've ever seen.
This one was dug up by Heather Flowers on Cohost!
Chess drama download: Ding Liren
For months, Bruno Dias has been my main source of information about Ding Liren, the current chess world grandmaster who is... not able to play chess. Something is clearly happening in his life and he has completely lost his juice. Bruno's blog post here gets into it, but this poor man's crisis (health crisis? unknown) has been absolutely pinned and skewered by the rules surrounding chess's world championship tournament format. Liren is now forced to play a painful championship match against an 18 year old who will almost certainly defeat him, and everyone knows it. Wild, painful stuff.
Link's Awakening LMAO
I have never played Link's Awakening. I'm trying to play it now--GBC, via emulation.
I was trying to go as far as I could without looking up ANY hints and I got all the way to Bottle Grotto without them before I cracked. Some of this stuff feels very adventure-game to me--I love it, but coming in blind without a manual or really much Zelda IP knowledge at all makes it hard for me to solve some of the puzzles, haha.
It's really delightful, though. I love the feeling of having to pull back on a pot to lift it up-- there's so many small perfect little examples of interaction delight in this one. Truly late to the fucking game here, but glad to be doing it anyway.
Everything Dr Stephen Maturin Dissects In Patrick O'Brian's "Master and Commander" and "Post Captain" - Daniel Lavery
You may not know this, but I was a fucking boat freak as a middle schooler. It was mainly because I'd learned how to sail dinghys--I had access to dollar-an-hour boat rentals at a lake near my house, and I used to rip around on a Sunfish every summer. I also read pretty much every bit of boat-centric historical fiction about the Napoleonic Wars that I could.
I read all the Patrick O'Brian Aubrey/Maturin books between 7th and 8th grade. My friends made fun of me for reading "dad books," which I didn't mind. In college, however, a professor of mine made fun of me for reading and enjoying them in front of a visiting guest... who was Patrick O'Brian's literary editor?? Literally the guy who signed off on all the dad books??? I don't know, it made no sense. I really did quit talking about them after that, though.
So it was extremely funny to me to see that Daniel Lavery has begun reading them... and that he immediately appreciates what makes them so good. He's collected all the references to animal and human dissection from the first two books here. I knew that there were a lot of dissection jokes in those books, but it was pretty funny to see all of them in one place.
And this summary of dissection gags really does capture the vibe of those stories... so if you like this, you should consider checking out the books!
Inoreader
I was a big RSS user back in the day--a lot of my first games industry job was basically me watching RSS feeds and writing up news reports for a bizdev team, so I had the biggest and most complexly organized RSS reader around, haha.
But it's been a long time since I used one, and I now want to follow a lot more than just blog RSS feeds. I was glad to find that Inoreader also ingests YouTube channels, subreddits, newsletters, Mastodon accounts, etc. and presents them all within the same folder framework and UI.
This means that I can follow both YouTube channels and blogs about transit in the same place. It's a crucial solution for topics which are highly visual, or usually covered by video. I've felt invigorated to devote more time to this reading because I know that the non-blog stuff I'm also interested in will be in the mix as well.
Highly recommend using this RSS reader if you want to make sure that reading blogs is integrated into the rest of your life on the web!
It was never about the numbers - aurahack
A great post about how visible metrics numbers on social media sites can Harm Your Brain. I have never had the kind relationship with virality described here, but the broad gamification of sites like twitter has negatively affected me in similar ways.
I think that we kind of missed a beat here in games when a lot of writers and creators in the space (justifiably) ripped apart the concept of "gamification" in the early 2010s. We never turned that same force of criticism on Twitter, the site we were all using to network and socialize. It was certainly "gamified" in that same rotten sense... as were plenty of other sites, like DeviantArt. Some numbers just shouldn't be visible.
Catalina Island
When this posts, I'll be on my way home from Catalina Island, a weird resort island right off the coast of Los Angeles. Its wikipedia page is a hell of a read. This place has been a resort for the last 100 years, and is almost entirely owned by a single nonprofit. It's like a self-contained tourism quarantine zone.
I've lived in LA for almost 10 years and haven't ever visited, so I figured now was the time. My husband and I are going there to bike into the interior, which requires a $35 USD pass. (Which is actually a $35-per-year recurring Conservancy membership fee.) Catalina is expensive, and sometimes it's expensive in dumb ways set up to trick you, like this "pass," which is actually a recurring credit card payment I'll have to cancel afterward. To be perfectly honest, the experience of organizing this weekend trip pissed me off so bad that Catalina biking will have to be really fucking good for me to forgive it. There are a lot of magnificent natural spaces in the LA area that you can enter for free!!
Stay tuned for my future report on it, I guess!