Well, here we are again, another week come and gone.
I’ve had some ups and downs lately. Trying to stay off of social media while I’m at work, which is nice because it exposes me to The Horrors less, but also makes me feel a bit more disconnected from the world. Kind of a trade off there, I suppose. Been swinging between an newly rejuvenated sense of self-confidence and some regular ol’ depression. I can accomplish anything I put my mind to, but it feels like that doesn’t matter a whole lot, y’know.
Reading / Watching / Playing / Listening
Reading: A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.
This week I read about the first half of A Canticle for Leibowitz, the classic post-apocalyptic novel by… some guy who never wrote anything else, except for a sequel to this book that is, apparently, terrible.
It’s for the new unit of Shelved by Genre, they’re actually covering a genre this time and not the works of a specific author. In this case: post-apocalyptic literature. I believe the plan is to read Leibowitz, then Dr. Bloodmoney; or, How We Got Along After the Bomb and finally The Brown Girl in the Ring. Should be a good time, I’ve never read any of these, and hadn’t even heard of the latter two.
Anyway, it’s pretty damn good! I’m enjoying it a lot. Reading the first few chapters I was really thinking “damn so this is where the Fallout developers got, like, everything, huh.” It’s wild the extent to which that’s all here, except for the specifics. It’s in the desert, there’s a weird religious order but it’s just catholics, the main character uncovers an ancient buried fallout shelter that has a skeleton in it which hints, darkly, at the fate of a long-dead resident. Like, it’s all there.
But it’s less concerned with like trying to stop an evil army of supermutants while wearing power armor, and more about a contemplation on the nature of faith and technology. Well, not just technology, but all human civilization and knowledge, but that’s kinda where it starts.
Mid-century scifi (this one is from 1959) is always fun to ready, because it’s so… free with its imagination, and also so crystal clear about the source of its anxieties, which is basically always nuclear weapons. In the proceeding decades, that tends to be muddled with metaphors and whatnot, a vague idea of a deadly superweapon or some sort of forbidden knowledge, but this is so direct and clear that’s fun to engage with.
The first part is mostly about monastic life, in a world that is basically pre-medieval. Subsistence existence, fears of bandits and mutants and mutant bandits, people cowering behind walls etc etc. No hint of doing anything with preserved knowledge of the past, just the act of preserving it. The second part is leaning more towards the opening of a pandora’s box, and that makes it pretty clear where it’s going (another nuclear war).
It makes me think about how writers have it easy when it comes to this kind of worldbuilding. Fallout has been groping for this sort of cyclical ideal for its entirely existence, but it’s just so damn hard to put a game together that they can’t move the timeline forward. But a single author can just jot down a thousand years of history in a few paragraphs if they want to. There’s no budget to writing besides time and effort.
Watching: Hunter x Hunter (2011)
Following along with a different podcast, Media Club Plus, I finished the Chimera Ant Arc of Hunter x Hunter.
I read the original manga years ago, but honestly I was a bad reader. Only half paying attention, really in it for the cool fights and powers, so on and so forth. I’d heard so much about how good it was, and came away a bit disappointed, especially with the much-vaunted Chimera Ant Arc. Watching the anime has forced to to take it more slowly and I’ve definitely enjoyed it a lot more, though the pacing still leaves something to be desired.
There’s definitely a part of me that like… wants to reject things that are popular, especially with people who have pretensions of doing cogent media analysis and whatnot. It’s very silly, and I recognize that, a sort of leftover kneejerk contrarianism, trying to defend my own taste by lashing out.
But also: there are issues here. I think the Chimera Ant Arc is biting off a bit more than it can chew, and mixing metaphors in some weird ways. The hosts of that podcast latched onto the essentially nihilist and misanthropic message of like “humanity is evil”, but I actually think what’s going on is more nuanced and kind of interesting. Reducing it down to moral judgments is just not something I’m interested in at all. That is a place where I do not feel the need to defensively project my own true beliefs before me as a shield.
That is the real sticking point for me, I guess. Bringing in these ants as a sort of mirror for humanity is fun and all, but it feels like a weird outside context latched onto a story that I already liked for what it was. Honestly, the preceding and succeeding arcs are much more interesting to me, as well as the current arc in the manga, which is completely buck wild.
It’s ultimately a matter of taste, and this arc is not to my taste, even though it had some great moments. Felt like too much of a slog overall, and I missed the other half of the cast, which has been missing since the previous arc.
Playing: Golden Sun
Yes, the old Game Boy Advance game. I’ve been playing it on and off during work, as a way to kind of rest my brain before bit bouts of coding. I’m working on a big, intense project lately, and it’s hard to stay focused when I try to plow my way through it.
This game is a delight. I played a bit of it back in the day, borrowed it from a friend in middle school, but never finished it. It was one of those things that felt mysterious and cool, seeing these weird elaborate attacks. The whole Djinn system definitely went over my head back then, I was not a very attentive gamer, so to speak.
This style of graphics is something you truly do not see anymore. There are people doing pixel art and more and more low-poly and other forms of stylized art in indie games, but this specific type of super crunchy and blurry prerendered sprites? Nobody’s doing that. The closest thing to it that exists is the remake of Super Mario RPG that came out a couple years ago, but that was obviously all cleaned up and made HD.
It’s really a spectacle RPG. There is not a strong narrative thrust, it’s about seeing these cool animations in battle, and doing these fun little environmental puzzles. There is a plot, of course, but the cutscenes and writing are kind of bad. It’s very much of the mode of “alright go to the next town and do their dungeon”. Going from place to place solving problems, the formula perfected by the Dragon Quest series.
But it’s perfect for my purposes. Nothing too taxing, get in there and fight a few random battles, solve a puzzle or two, then put it down again. Fills a niche, for me.
Oh, also it has one of the best fan wikis I’ve ever seen in my life!? It is so complete and well-written and well-organized, and it’s not on Fandom! I guess when there’s a small number of entries in a series, people can really document every single thing about it more easily, huh.
Listening: Perpetua 02: Shadow of the Dragon Tower Pt. 2
After like a seven month hiatus, Friends at the Table is back and better than ever. This season is very JRPG-inspired, so it’s only natural that I’m a big fan of it. The worldbuilding episodes were a real treat, I love how they always play a different game to figure out those sorts of details.
The main sort of gimmick of this world, that it’s scheduled to end on a regular basis and the next apocalypse is coming up, well, not soon but in the foreseeable future (400 years) is an interesting one. Obviously, the idea is that our heroes will discover the reason for this and prevent it, but I’m sure Austin has some twists planned for how that plays out.
A more crunchy system is an odd fit for this show, which is so fiction-forward and like… chatty. They’re not used to dealing with like intense resource management and whatnot, but so far it hasn’t been a huge problem. Definitely not like the beginning of Counter/Weight where they had so much trouble with the game system that they straight up switched to another one.
Anyway, it’s a good time. I love the fleggs, this world’s little mascot monsters. I love Uncly Nicky, Art’s character who is a cross between Guy Fieri and Luca Brasi. I love the tragic priestess character journeying to save the world. It’s all good stuff.
Laying the Groundwork
This week I found some energy to get started on my new website.
I basically want a chance to practice and play around with things that I use for work, so I’m making it with Django. This is a Python framework that allows you very deep access to how pages are rendered, and you can also easily define and access a database right there in the same code. It’s very convenient, like PHP if it wasn’t terrible.
My work is mostly boring productivity software that is not supposed to be designed at all. Early on in my job, my boss threw me a couple projects with some design work, and I did a terrible job at them because I was in the middle of training myself out of thinking about things like that, and I was too nervous to really be creative. Still feel kinda bad about that, but oh well.
Now I can do whatever I want. This is all for me, I have the money to buy some hosting and a domain and whatever little licenses I need along the way. I’m an adult! I have the power to sit down and figure out anything I want to.
Since my job is in making neat little tools to help people do their jobs, naturally I was inspired to do the same for… my life! In the last year, I’ve made myself a couple of big ol’ google docs spreadsheets to just Keep Track of Things. A poor replacement for a stack of books or a to-do list, basically. So I’m gonna try making something like that as a little web app. Probably only for my use, but I may open it up, just for fun.
But the other thing I want to do is go wild with some design. Use some fancy animations, dig deep into obscure CSS rules and HTML elements, use this fancy book of color palettes I bought a while back. Just go and mess around with things without pressure. Last time I was doing this, I was losing my mind because I was trying to get a job, and at work I’m on the clock, trying to get things done as quick as possible. But now? I can take my damn time.
Ideological Purity and Children’s Cartoons
Alright, it’s time for Robin to complain about online discourse for a minute. Please bare with me.
Okay, so there’s a certain mode of leftist discourse that absolutely drives me up a wall. It’s been cropping up a lot lately around the TV show Andor, which I have been enjoying a great deal (I’ll probably write about it next week, the finale is tomorrow).
The basic idea is this: this media object may seem like it has a leftist message on its surface, you may be reading it that way, but actually some shitty conservative person can read it as agreeing with them! Plus, it’s made by an evil corporation! Therefore, it is not actually good in the way that you think it is, and your reading is (implicitly) wrong.
It is, essentially, a cowardly way of arguing. It’s cynicism dressed up as intellectual rigor. It’s ceding the field because you don’t think you can win, and in fact don’t want to win because what you’re fighting for is not a political position, but your own self-satisfaction. It’s connected with this notion that the context of the creation of a piece of art just is its entire political content, but that’s kind of a separate issue.
It’s like… yeah, man, you could argue all sorts of things. You can read things all kinds of different ways. Why are you retreating? Why are you giving this one up? Why are you not putting forth a strong leftist reading of everything you possibly can? Why are you trying to keep it as this unattainable and mythical thing that exists only in your mind, rather than part of the world that everyone lives in together?
But, whatever, as I’ve said many times: I’m not an academic. This whole notion that things must be ideologically pure in every aspect in order to carry good content probably has some sort of merit if you dig deep enough. And it’s not fair to expect nuanced discourse out in public where everyone can see… but then that’s kind of my point, really. Just go out there and say the damn thing! Take the win! Put up a fight and claim it for yourself! Ugh!
Well, I was worried about coming up with enough material for a proper blog post, but I think I managed it pretty well. Once I get going, the words just flow from my fingertips. It does help to remind myself that this is just… for me. Getting it out of my head, onto the page.
Until next time, shipmates!
The Beige Moth 