The Everything Wrapup of 2023
Here we are, at the end of the year.
I write a lot on this blog — this year represents a full 365,000 words, more or less. I cover a range of topics, too, with ideas like the interactions within queerness and politics, the life of a fundamentalist Christian, game making, writing, media analysis and of course, by volume, tons and tons of Dungeons & Dragons nonsense.
Chances are, at the end of the year, you haven’t read everything I’ve done. I have, but I’m just one person, and therefore, statistically negligible. What if you want to read a bunch of stuff on my blog, but don’t know what I made this year that you’d think is cool?
Let me give you a run-down on my favourite articles of 2023, then! Get ready for some links!
Decemberween ’23 — The New Music From This Year
How do you listen to new music?
I understand it’s really common for most people to listen to music in their cars or using systems like Spotify, which I don’t like and don’t drive. That’s right, I don’t like cars and I don’t drive Spotify. I listen to podcasts when I travel, usually, and I listen to music while I work at my computer, because I want something that affects my mood while I’m doing, like, this work.
Frustratingly, just because it’s usually there and ad-free, I let Youtube throw mixes at me. Then when I’ve noticed I’ve done that enough that some songs are part of my personal lexicon, I go and acquire those songs some other way, whether bandcamp (in the case of small bands) or
I want to nakedly recommend an mp3 collection to you. You don’t need special software to manage it. You can just dump all your music in a great big heap and use the search function on any mp3 player you like to find the songs you want. You have paid for music, you have paid for the right to use it in different forms, spotify subscriptions are not paying artists and they are rent-seeking on things you can buy directly, or in many cases have already bought.
Anyway, here’s the stuff that I added to my mp3 collection this year.
Continue Reading →Game Pile: The Top Threes Of Twenty Twenty Threen
Wew am I tired.
Anyway here’s the list of links:
Decemberween ’23 — Decay!
There’s a very real consequence to being my friend, in that I will bring you terrible things to point and laugh at, unless you make it clear I shouldn’t.
Twitter has been a strange part of my life, in that it is simply put, a bad space and the actual reach and improvement it gave my life, while tangible, is hard to quantify versus the effort it took. I try to think of it less as a product I spent my labor on and more a play space I used, and try to ignore the ways in which whatever chemistry drove that place also absolutely scrubbed layers off me in the process of its operation. But Twitter is something I think of as a site I used, and my account only persists so when someone inevitably links me something because they’re not off the site either.
Anyway, one of the friends I made on Twitter was Decay, and Decay is great.
Decemberween 2023 — Nixie IV
Hey, you know Nixie right? I talk about her about once a year, it seems. You know, the one who likes planes. The one who likes guns. The one who watches anime and recommends I check some out. The one who contributed to my Air America article, the one who contributed to the Nicolas Cage Month Con Air article, and the one who has gotten an article multiple Decemberweens in a row now.
It’s not just because I get to use pictures from Ascendance of a Bookworm because they remind me of her.
Anyway, this year, Nixie went to China and became a pirate.
Continue Reading →Decemberween ’23 — Shelf!
It’s funny to me how my skill for making the mundane into the histrionic, one of the only skills I really acquired in church, is something that I always want to employ in the benefit of showing off how great my friends are. I want to raise the rafters and woo the crowd and sway the senses as I tell you, as I extol to you, as I exhort you, about how the good and wellbeing of my social circle or even just people I think deserve attention but are too shy go get it for themselves, are great things, and how my friends, these people around me deserve your attention and respect and praise and at the very least, a monument here, in this year, to show that I know they matter to me and that they are so important to my own heart and soul that it stymies me. That whole skillset jerks to a halt when I have to get too sincere about something I love. Or in this case, someone I love.
I know I’ve mentioned Shelf before. I’ve mentioned Shelf when talking about cancer and I’ve talked about Shelf when learning about failed medications and I’ve talked about Shelf when sitting late in the dark, afraid for my friend who is without power in the storms that make Canada colder than Mars. Shelf is almost a regular fixture at this point, you could probably go through and map a bunch of Shelf content on my blog.
But I couldn’t not talk about Shelf this year. I wrote down the people I wanted to talk about, the way my heart sings thinking about the things and people and ideas that have made this year better, and here, closest to Christmas, I just… couldn’t not talk about Shelf.
Continue Reading →Story Pile: Yuru Camp Christmas Episodes
Happy Decemberween everybody! Fox and I didn’t want to just rain on your parade today, so instead of pointing to a crappy piece of media that sucks butts, we decided to instead enjoy some nice, happy, chill anime about friends being friends at Christmas, and definitely not girlfriends right.
Decemberween ’23 — Fox
Some things you have to write in the dark, so you don’t look at yourself while you do it.
Decemberween ’23 — Jason!
I think about these friend posts from time to time which runs the risk of making my really cool friends who are constantly doing things and making stuff in the day to day, like, more likely to get attention. And that’s not a terrible thing, after all, this is still the attention economy or whatever, by posting about my friend Amber, I might direct attention to her online presence and her cool cosplays, or if I post about my friend Nixie I might get people looking at her Patreon, all that kinda thing.
I wanna talk, today, this close to Christmas, though, about a friend who doesn’t really put himself out there on the internet, and who isn’t here to ‘sell’ himself. Sure, we’ve done that kinda thing, we’ve all had fun doing things… but
like
Some friends I want to talk about, and who I think about, because they’re my friends and I love them and that’s really cool and really good. Because my friends are great.
Continue Reading →Game Pile: the 2023 State Of The Pile
Hhhhwhut.
Is the Game Pile?
For those unfamiliar, the Game Pile is a feature on this blog. It’s a column. It’s a weekly project. It is a war on the idea of a backlog. It’s an excuse to talk about whatever I want with a game as a feature. It’s a behavioural practice that I use to make sure this blog is not just twelve games back to back in a streak when I play them. And it’s a physical, tangible, thing.
I started using ‘game pile’ to refer to my games collection. This was originally because it was spread across my Steam collection, and some Good Old Games (remember when that was their name?), and some Humble Bundle games. I thought about it as a sort of form of the backloggery; that I’d play a game, and then write about it, in a purest diary sense. Some of my earliest Game Pile articles are microscopic, meaninglessly tiny examinations of games well before I got my dial in on how much time I spent on writing about games. Back when I started, I very much imagined this blog would be a gateway to working for a paid website selling my writing, ala a games Journalist.
Ironically, I think I was thinking of myself as following a path a bit like Ben Croshaw, which.
Huh, big news on that front this year.
Anyway, you ever wonder ‘what is the Game Pile? What’s the size? Is there progress in it?’
And sort of.
Decemberween ’23 — Urban Planning Youtube
Learning things is so cool. You come to understand things about the world around you and the way they operate and maybe this helps you make decisions going forwards about things that interest you. There’s a dark mirror to that though where sometimes you’ll learn about how a thing in your everyday life has been messed up for your whole life and it doesn’t have to be and…
Yeah.
Nobody’s doing anything about it.
Wanna learn about Urban Planning?
Wanna learn about one of many terrible things you interact with every day and how badly handled it is? And how the people who handle it badly want it that way, for bad and selfish reasons, and because they assume nobody knows or cares enough to address them?
Continue Reading →The How To Be Covers of 2023
Hey do you want a single article with nice, clear, readable version of all of 2023’s How To Be book covers? I like to imagine you do, so here’s a post with them in it!
Continue Reading →Decemberween ’23 — The Poorhammer Podcast
I don’t play Warhammer. I don’t have the little miniature boys, I don’t have the equipment for painting them, I don’t have the space to paint them, one of them cool little lamps for making them look good while you paint them. I can’t really identify the mechanical differences between Warhammer 40k and Age of Sigmar and what the point of the play experiences are and how they differ one from another. If I’m sitting down at a table with at least one friend and some miniatures and hours of investment, I’m going to play 4th edition D&D —
— the best edition of D&D —
and not the heavy metal gameplay experience that is Warhammer Of Some Variety. None of this is to say, however, that the game lacks appeal, and like a gawker on a roadside attraction, I still pay attention to the space. Mostly, however, through the podcast Poorhammer, which is about getting into the game while spending as little money as possible.
Story Pile: Cobra Claws Are Coming To Town
Once more into Decemberween product, this time I recruit the help of Canadian Wildermyth Doc Destructo to talk about the shockingly enjoyable christmas special episode of the 1985 GI Joe Cartoon!
Here’s the audio of the conversation:
And here’s a link to the episode in question:
And here’s a link to Doc’s Youtube and Patreon!
Decemberween ’23 — Survivor Histories
Last year I spoke about how I had taken to leaving a channel of ‘horror movie summarised’ videos up on a second screen while I watched. It was effectively, asking a nerd with some very shallow media analysis skills to advertise horror movies at me and while I found it meaningfully engaging for just long enough to get my brain around the problems I was facing at the time, it was remarkable the ease with which I completely dropped the entire idea this year. I think I wrote that article and immediately forgot even the name of the channel, which is why I haven’t gone and looked it up since, even though as you read this and as I write it, I should be linking it. It’s a blog, it should be cross referenced.
But nah.
Anyway, I think it’s important to recognise the junk food you eat. This year, I spent a month or so learning everything I ever wanted to know about Survivor, and then forgetting it just as quickly.
Decemberween ’23 — This Year’s ASMRtists
If you’re not familiar with it, ASMR is an abbreviation meaning ‘autonomous sensory meridian response,’ a science sounding name for a reaction that some people get to a range of stimuli. This effect can be caused by a whole host of triggers but at least in the community on Youtube there’s a body of people who engage with it because of its ability to affect relaxation and restful mindsets. If you’re not familiar with what this looks like, it looks like a bunch of people making long videos with a strangely hushed affect.
And I watch and listen to them, to help me relax!
If you are familiar with it, hey, here’s some of the artists I’ve been watching this year, as the ASMR effect shifts around in my head and how I respond to it. One thing that people who don’t experience ASMR might not realise is that you can rely only on the effect being modestly unpredictable. Some stuff may cause it reliably for months and then suddenly, nothing. It pushes me to partake of new things regularly, and to that end, every year, I try to look at what artists are ‘new’ to me that I haven’t mentioned before.
Here then are four artists that I started paying attention to this year:
Continue Reading →Game Pile: Just One
Chances are if you’re like me, you’re going to be dealing with some family gatherings, and those gatherings are almost certainly going to feature downtime where people are looking for something to do. And again, if you’re like me you might be thinking well this is the time to bust out a board game or a card game and you have to resist that urge. You have to resist the urge because this is not the time to teach someone how to play Resistance with its tension and its lying and its complicated steps. Right now, you need a party game, and you need a party game so good that it’ll work for almost any grouping that are capable of engaging with the idea of playing a game together. I don’t have a lot of party games in my collection, and I know what my collection would look like if I was limiting myself to …
This party game is one of the easiest games to get playing out of any I’ve ever played. It’s a game that lives alongside other party beasts like Codenames, Werewolf and even the basically-free A Fake Artist Goes To New York.
Continue Reading →Decemberween ’23 — Smogon RBY Afficionados
This is pretty funny when you consider last month I wrote three thousand words about how I think Smogon has a fundamental problem in terms of its game design toolkit. Wa hey anyway.
I’ve talked about how when it comes to any given internet niche you run the risk of running headlong into the cursed distinction between ‘pronouns in bio :)’ and ‘pronouns in bio :^)’. There are a whole lot of spaces on the internet where you can always find someone who knows way too much about it and is happy to infodump to you about it, and for the increasingly pointed niches, those interests are usually represented by a truly sweaty nerd or some detail oriented queer person. It is in this space that I wish to proffer to you two people who make interesting material about Smogon.
Not only Smogon, but the part of Smogon focusing on a game mode which has three Pokemon that probably are 100% represented. That’s right, Red Blue Yellow, the oldest metagame of all, and the weirdest.
Let me show you the work of Plague Von Karma and Big Yellow.
Continue Reading →Decemberween ’23 — Adventure Game Speedruns
Sometimes a creator has a central hook to what they make videos about and it’s nice and easy to share. OneShortEye makes videos, at the moment, about speedrunning adventure games, a type of game that’s largely seen as not being about speedrunning.
And they’re great.
You can just watch the channel by glancing it any time you want. It’s just a list of videos, and you can pick the ones that interest you. I want to talk about the ones that interest me, specifically. And disclaimer: I like pretty much all these videos. Like, the Laura Bow videos are interesting. The Monkey Island ones are interesting. The Owl Quest one, which is a joke, is interesting.
But if you want a sort of sense of continuity across these things, I want to draw your attention to the near-complete anthology that describes the speedruns of the Kings Quest games.
Continue Reading →Decemberween ’23 — Behind The Bastards
I like depressing media, apparently.
Produced by Robert Evans and a bunch of other people I can’t immediately credit off the top of my head, Behind the Bastards is a podcast that releases about three episodes a week, with a standardised format of Robert, with research on hand, explaining a historical narrative about the worst goddamn people in history, both current and in the past, and the ways in which their ways of being have resulted in a suckier world. Evans’ particular style of journalism is extremely dry and sarcastic, but also seems to project just holding tight on a deeply white hot held rage about the world and the way it is.
And he podcasts about it, reading this story to a friend, who gets progressively more sad and upset over the course of the episode.
Continue Reading →Story Pile: Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas
Fox and I bring back the Disney Animated Canonball band together for one last ride as we look at the attempts of Disney to use their existing characters to tell a Christmas story. It’s not good! In fact, it’s pretty dire!
Decemberween ’23 — Dweebovision
We live in an age of external participation in games. Watching people play games is so long-lasting a practice that I literally cannot imagine a place it started. Even the earliest games have examples of people caring about the outcomes of games they weren’t playing, one way or another. The immense video firehose that is the internet and its significantly lowered cost to engage is a way we can take formerly niche games and present them to their audiences.
David Webb is Very Good at Scrabble and word games. In the ecosystem of British Television, he is a serial prize winner, showing up on various TV shows, and winning you know, teapots and houses, and whatever else British TV gives people as rewards for winning on their particular kind of game shows. If you don’t want to watch for reruns of 90s TV shows to see Mr Webb at work, though, you can tune into his Youtube channel, and watch how every few days, he presents a new Scrabble match against high-level players, with extremely detailed, clear step-by-step thinking of him trying to win the game aggressively and how he does it.
Continue Reading →Decemberween ’23 — Skip Intro
I think I’ve done a great job of making this month’s festival of free media for your engagement particularly educational, and I’m not planning on stopping. Part of Da Ween is revelling in honestly appreciating the things I really like, and so, I should, surely, share these things that make me laugh, make me smile, and make me think.
Anyway, I watch Skip Intro to learn about American policing systems as represented in media and provide a comprehensive breakdown of the different facets of copaganda, an insidious practice that’s used to reinforce racism and classism and just all the isms that capitalism likes.
Wheeee.
Continue Reading →Game Pile: Burning The Gavle Goat (Is A Game)
Decemberween ’23 — Drawfee
If you’re passingly aware of being funny on the internet, a discipline started with Seanbaby, perfected by Loading Ready Run and then monetised by College Humour, you might already know about Drawfee. The Dropout network, the continuation of the thing that once was College Humour, has its own spinoffs, and its own subscription service.
I don’t have the subscription service, mind you. I just look at the stuff made by their artist spinoff, the artists who run a channel now known as Drawfee.
Drawfee is an artist channel, where the general gimmick, as repeated, is that they take your dumb suggestions and make even dumber drawings. They don’t, usually, the art they produce is full of character and life and there’s all sorts of ridiculous joy to be seen while these friends draw and talk to one another about drawing. There’s some stuff that talks about general trends in art – like the Octobertober, where they do a bunch of October art challenges, every day grabbing a bunch of random prompts from a different kind of art challenge, whether Cutegirltober or Inktober or Cringetober.
There are typically four standard artists – Karina, Jacob, Nathan and Julia – and they have distinct voices, art styles and interests. You’ll pick up pretty quickly who likes doing what, depending on the subject matter. Nathan has a very low key, chill vibe, Karina is a gremlin cat with a knife, Jacob is Standard Male Art Nerd, and Julia ignores the brief. And… that’s it. That’s the show. They show up, they make a video about them drawing, and that’s half an hour show, every few days. There’s a stream channel as well, for more long form art where they talk to one another, which has the energy of, well, hanging out with other artists.
Continue Reading →Decemberween ’23 — Technology Cult Documentaries
About a month ago now, I had a chat with a peer at work. We were talking about the way that one of our cohort had started research into the NFT Marketplace, and it was a rough place to be because he had to open every talk and presentation with ‘I know, but,’ and that was just fundamentally rough as a place to be as a researcher. We got talking about it and I mentioned, offhandedly, how all of the conversation around these things were obviously fake to me, and something like this followed:
Haven’t any of these people seen a cult before?”
“No, uh, I do think that that’s really a you thing.
And this stuck with me. I know about cults because I was in one. I had to dismantle the experience for a long time to get a handle on it. And right now, the way that cults had formed in digital spaces, meant that that kind of weird social experience might be so decontextualised people might not even notice them.
Fortunately, Dan Olson of Folding Ideas has done some great documentaries about cults that coagulate on the internet.
Continue Reading →Decemberween ’23 — Mormon Histories
Last year I spent a chunk of time listening to a Rabbi explaining the differences between Tanakh and Christian translations thereof, and that was really interesting. Despite all this, though, I never quite turned the corner and decided that actually, dude was in the right and it was time to convert to Judaism but in the process, I still learned a lot and enjoyed what I learned. Notably, though, that was an active participant in a faith with real, meaningful scholarship about actual historical events and real translations to work from, exploring and expositing the truth of them as best he understood it. That was really interesting to me.
When we talk about Mormonism, those tools aren’t going to be useful.
This is because Mormons are absolutely founded on complete nonsense.
Continue Reading →Story Pile: The Christmas Shepherd
This Decemberween, Fox and I continued our tradition of watching a Hallmark movie, about Christmas and Dogs, with the amazingly named The Christmas Shepherd. Did we get dog training weirdness like we saw last year?
No.
We got something way weirder!
Content Warning: Dog Theft?
Decemberween, Twenty Twenty Threen
Hey are you new here? Statistically speaking, no, but I’m still going to act like you are.
Long and short! Decemberween is here! All normal article content is suspended! Story Piles are going to be about Christmas movies and Game Piles are going to try and focus on things good for social experiences around family gatherings!
You can press more to read more about the kinds of things you’re going to see this month, or you can just go ‘oh okay, I’m not going to get a weird long-form story about a magician who lied about attacking the Nazis.’
Continue Reading →USP-11: November’s Custom Cards
In a world of adventures and conspiracies, with competing factions of shape-shifting identity thieves, there is always a chance that something can go wrong, that even the best and most elaborate plan can be thrown into disarray. There is no magic you can lay out that’s so reliable it won’t have someone finding a way to pick at it, to undo it, to render all your own planning, your own strategy for nothing.
Sometimes it’s for the subtlest of reasons, the positioning of a Masqued knife in the right dinner meeting that means a careful machination simply fails to happen. Sometimes, a goon from another world can show up, and out of sheer pique, decide to punch you in the face.
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains unsolicited designs of custom magic cards.
Continue Reading →Game Pile: Free Stuff!
I talk about games all the time but I am also crucially talking about commercial products. When I talk about TTRPGs or videogames, I’m usually talking about games that you can’t play for free, and that’s a bummer. I don’t like the idea that my writing about games primarily requires some degree of effort or money on your part to check, as it were, my working.
But there are some games I played this year that are free, and I think are interesting and cool and I’d like to make sure you know about them. In the tradition of Decemberween Twenty Twenty Threen, this Game Pile Post is just about a handful of freely available games that I like and want to recommend you try out.
I remember one year I made the Game Pile articles entirely games you could play at parties with friends for no money, like I had some kind of idea of how a Christmas gathering should go. My upcoming Christmas gathering is going to feature someone recovering from COVID though, so like, it’s on my mind how close I don’t want to sit to anyone.
Anyway, free games!
Continue Reading →