Alright, let’s try something different.
I want to write more, so I thought I’d get in the habit of posting some sort of regular update on my habits and thoughts. Almost like some sort of log, as on an old timey sailing ship… but rather than being locked in some old wooden chest, it instead lives on the marvellous web of information. Some sort of… web log… if you will. Perhaps we shall come up with a shortened term at some point, if it ever catches on.
Reading / Watching / Playing / Listening
So, first off I’ll just talk about what I’ve been doing lately, media-wise. I don’t want to use the word “content” here, even though it would make it less wordy. I’ll just do one for each, why not.
READING: The Little Sparrow Murders by Seishi Yokomizo
Just finished this book last night! It was really good, maybe my favorite after the Honjin Murders. Had some fun twists at the end, and it felt like a very fair mystery, which is a thing I have opinions about since I read Umineko a few years back.
The last few books have had a problem of like… having too few possible suspects. Like it’s either gonna be the obvious person or some completely inconsequential background character, no in-between. This has a more expansive cast that all feel well-rounded (to the extent a character in a mystery novel should be, anyway).
The setting also felt distinct, and I enjoyed how we got to spend a few chapters getting acclimated before the murders started happening. Thematically, it had some meat on it, touching on things like the rapid modernization of Japan and the lingering prejudices and paranoia from that and the post-war period. Mid-century Japan is always a fascinating time period to read about, especially from a more inside perspective like this.
I will say: it’s kinda funny how Kosuke Kindaichi, famous detective, has so far not actually prevented a single murder in any of these books, if I recall correctly. Yokomizo loves to make him just barely miss a critical clue or be off in another town at a critical moment, then reappear and say “ah yes, just as I figured” in the end. The books always have a somber and ghoulish tone that gives them a real weighty feeling.
WATCHING: Superman: The Movie
This came up on two podcasts I listen to in the last week. With Gourley and Rust covered it, and I listened to that just assuming I’d seen the movie before, but it became clear very quickly that I had not. It’s funny, I can definitely remember a lot of bits from it, and I know I’ve seen the three sequels, no idea how I managed to miss this one.
Well, anyway, it was pretty good. Not amazing or anything, but clear why it was a big and so influential at the time. Had some cool special effects at times, and other times some pretty rough ones. It’s easy to romanticize the older, simpler superhero films, but it’s also just kinda janky sometimes.
Did not know that they killed Pa Kent in this movie, that strikes me as very odd. Like I guess it makes sense as the climax for the Smallville segment of the film, but it doesn’t really fit for Clark’s character to need that kind of specific motivation to become a hero, y’know. For me it’s like… having parents always felt like a core part of Superman, as an archetype, in the same way that not having parents is part of Batman.
Maybe it’s because I grew up a) watching the Superman animated series and b) reading ancient comic books (or at least looking at their covers). I had always assumed the whole dead-dad thing was thought up by Zack Snyder for his take on the character, since it fits so well, and that’s a take that I absolutely reject and despise with my whole heart. This movie… was not that, it doesn’t get all caught up in “is he man or GOD” bullshit; it’s just sort of a storytelling maneuver to get things slotted into place. Very utilitarian.
Anyway, yeah, it was pretty good! Gene Hackman was a lot of fun as Lex Luthor, though some of his sidekick’s comedy bits were absolutely interminable.
PLAYING: Spelunky 2
I’ve decided to give this game another shot.
Spelunky is a game that is very special to me, I’ve put over 2,000 hours into it over the years. It’s never been a thing of like… exploring every nook and cranny, discovering the secrets, breaking the game, etc etc. It’s more like a meditative exercise, I open it up, play a round, die or win, and move on with my day. A way to sort of reset my brain, get some nervous energy out.
So, I bounced off the second game. All the little changes bugged me too much, it felt too harsh (an insane thing to say compared to Spelunky 1, a notoriously difficult game) and I didn’t like the aesthetics. It was too… smoothed out. I liked the overly-detailed and almost flash-game-inspired look of the original.
But really, I was just too used to the original. It was comfortable, like an old pair of jeans. I did not give the sequel a fair shot. So, now I am! And it’s going well, honestly. Obviously I haven’t yet mastered it to the same extent, but I’m having fun with it. Maybe I finally had my fill of the original after so many hours and wanted something just a little different.
I can pretty consistently get to the third strata, the underwater-themed zone. I know there are some tricks that I haven’t been able to figure out, but I’m not searching for them very seriously. My way into Spelunky was, weirdly, an LP from an old Something Awful forums regular, PsychedelicEyeball. I learned all kinds of tips and tricks from that which helped me immensely. But for the sequel, I’m flying blind, just figuring stuff out on my own.
LISTENING: Game Studies Study Buddies 81: Gameworld Interfaces
This is a podcast that I always kinda resist listening to and push back in my feed, but then I listen and love it. It’s such a fun show, so… intellecutally stimulating. I do need to be in the right mood for it though, if I’m too tired and distracted I just end up tuning out.
This episode was especially good, as they discovered this book from 2013 that cuts through a ton of the really annoying and stupid discourse in academic game studies. There’s always this annoying thing in academia of like… cutting things into too many different pieces and trying to analyze them individually.
I had a similar feeling when I listened to their episode on Cultural Studies 1983, where I kept saying to myself “well yeah, obviously” to the Big Ideas of the book. In both cases it’s about how these things are all one big thing, and are way more complicated and interconnected than everyone is acting like they are. The interface of a game is not just the menus! The experience of one person watching a movie or reading a book is not the same as someone in a different cultural context!
In my mind, it all comes back to being skeptical of generalization, no matter how tempting it may be, and it’s very tempting at times! When you start doing that, you just end up ignoring corner cases, and as a professional programmer I know all too well how that gets you into trouble.
But academia is built on generalization! It’s how the whole thing operates, you go and do your specific studies and say “well this can obviously apply to other things in x y and z ways”. I suppose the hard work, then, is identifying the specific ways in which that is not true, which this book does a great job of doing. I’m very tempted to track it down and read it myself, to be honest.
I Will Never Escape That Crooked Jaw
Still thinking about Moby-Dick; or, the Whale.
Of course, I mean, how could I not be? That last post was very satisfying to write, but my mind has been ruminating on it more and more. I was even tempted to go back and edit it, but that would be silly at this point.
Almost immediately, my thought was: wait I probably should have mentioned the elephant in the room of ANY piece of antebellum (and many postbellum) American art: slavery! It comes up a few times in the text, and in my big spiel about unseen and unappreciated labor, that’s a pretty obvious one to look at, huh. But also it’s kinda… not that interesting to me? I don’t think I need to wax poetic about the evils of slavery, that’s cerainly been done. I don’t have a unique perspective on it. Suffice it to say: all that stuff I wrote obviously applies there, and I think it’s pretty clear where Melville’s sympathies lie.
The other thing that hit me last night is that I didn’t quite square the circle on all the stuff about myth-making and the athetistic themes of the book. These systems and ideas of faith driving life-and-death decisions are something that Melville finds absolutely horrifying.
It runs through the whole book! It’s all very well and good to be philosophical, to have notions and ideas about the world, to color things in your own particular way. But when you start letting that lead you by the nose, start defining your own private reality that exists in your own head at the expense of others around you, then you’re committing a terrible crime. A dereliction of duty to your fellow human being.
It even ties in with one of my favorite chapters, The Whiteness of the Whale. The colors that are painted over the horrorshow of reality are analogous to the myths that Ishmael paints over his tale of woe. Better to imagine Ahab a tragic hero than a greedy old man who got everyone killed for no good reason, it’s the only way to stay sane, and yet it is also a great crime.
And that connects back to slavery too, where all these lies told about the Black population covered up the terrible truths of the whole system. Making excuses, covering up, justfying, these practices all deny the reality of the world; they give us a psychological out that allows us to maintain our ideological dissonance.
Maybe I should just write one more wrap-up post and write all that out properly, with citations… but nah. I’m good on it for now.
A New Project
At the beginning of this year, I had a notion to finally make a new website, using all the skills I’ve developed from my job. I had a big plan for how I was gonna do it, and then… stalled out basically the second I had to go back to work.
Staring a screen all day makes it hard to continue staring when one gets home. But, I end up doing that anyway, and I want to stretch myself and make something more interesting, so I still want to do it. To that end, I think I’m going to start doing another weekly series of posts on this blog writing about my work on this new website.
My old website isn’t bad by any means, I still stand by the design work, and it has some cool functionality, but I want to start fresh. It’s been over three years since I made that one, after all.
The basic idea is taht I want to make a Django app, because that’s what I do at work. And then fix it up with some cool little tools, like a simple to-do list and wish list and whatnot. All the free apps for managing stuff like that don’t work exactly the way I want them to, so I want to make my own, damnit!
Also it’d just be fun to do design work again. I almost never get to do that at work, beyond some simple page layouts.
Wow, I wrote a lot more than I planned to.
Uhh I guess I do have enough to say for a sort of weekly roundup post like this, huh. Ah, back on cohost I used to split this up into a bunch of posts throughout the week… and for a while I was doing a regular movie review thing, too. Perhaps that’s what I yearn to replace, in my heart….
The Beige Moth 