It’s funny to me that I know more things that reference the phrase march comes in like a lion and leaves like a lamb than I have ever heard the phrase in its own sake. It’s a floating signifier. I think, if you forced me to explain it, it’s a phrase about the sudden shift in the weather at the start of March and then the way it very slowly settles down, which sounds like either a reference to a specific period of time or a reference to a weather pattern that’s very different to me here. Here in Australia, March comes in like Extra February and leaves like Soggy February.
You didn’t come here to listen to me talking about the wet ones, though, you came here to see a monthly roundup of interesting articles on interesting topics that I think you, yes, you, should consider going and reading and now I’m going to present them to you in a sort of ‘list’ form that makes it easier for you to break them down into your areas of interest!
First up, what about the standard features of Story Pile and Game Pile articles?
Well, Story Pile first:
- The second and third seasons of My Hero Academia, a show that’s, okay? Getting okay?
- Arrival, a modern movie about how governments would respond to a globally significant, collaborative problem.
- Ultra, the Rachel Maddow historical podcast about the history of the fascist Right Wing in American politics, and the way that famous people were doing things because Nazis were paying them to do them.
Game Pile
- Klotski, a game which made me think about speedrunning as a relationship to your conditions
- Forms and Factions, discussing the enemy factions in City of Heroes
- Necromolds, a game I played with Fox and talked about at length with her there
- Balikbayan, a creative TTRPG where I wanted to listen more than to command
- Infocom’s Infidel, which goes up tomorrow and talks about a thing that you might think is reasonably new, but really isn’t!
And now, outside of that, here are some other articles from this month that I’m pretty proud of:
- A Game I Don’t Know How To Make; I got asked by a patreon subscriber about making a game of a particular type, and the idea I followed led me to a space where I don’t have skills.
- Defending the Defended, where I talk about how we frame our own engagement with enormously popular things.
- The Magic Circle (The Magic is Racism), where I considered the way that nonwhite games scholars have really different opinions about the sacrosanct isolation of games.
- Paperclippers, a rare excursion from me into actual fiction writing based on listening to a lot of goofy conspiracy theory types trying to sell people on their nonsense fiction of secret Mars bases.
- Us Beastfolk, and what it means to be a political class of ‘animal’ people, and how the title needed to be self-imposed or it’s a slur.
- The Tiny God of Christianity, where I considered the way that God, as I understood him growing up, was kind of pathetically limited.
- Veganism in Pokemon and how the topic is complicated by sentient plants and consensual farming.
- Playing with Your Food, drawing games to a close conveniently.
- The Fastest Woman In History, where I tried to answer a simple question and found a bunch of annoying, complex answers that featured a bunch of racism.
- Bob Ross’ Basilisk, where I reflect on generative art, and how regardless of the tool, the surrounding experience calls on us to treat each other better.
Also, for this month’s shirt-or-sticker design I decided to follow my heart and make something based on my ongoing archive binge of Knowledge Fight to examine the depressing mediocrity of the media empire of Alex Emerich Jones. I think of Jones as very much the Garfield of his space – he’s got no actual ideology, no position of his own to hold to, he’s just doing everything he can to sustain his position in the media landscape he is, which means standing in the middle of the worst fucking people and yes-anding them. This meant yes-anding a few ideas that may have led to him getting slapped with a nearly two billion dollar bill, because speech is free, but lies can cost you.
You can have this sticker in a variety of sizes, available here.
This month marks the start of a new semester of teaching. I’m teaching two classes this semester; one on game making, one on emergent media devices. It’s interesting to work on these two spaces because one of them is very reliable and cares about universally applicable structures in people’s minds. You need to understand and empathise with people and recognise incentive systems to make good games, and that serves as the underpinning fundamentally of experience design. The other class is about looking at tools like generative art software and chatGPT and Augmented Reality tools while I try to very politely inform students that these tools are probably going to look real different in two years’ time. There, the skill is about trying to make sure the students are aware of the ethical needs of these toolkits, and to get them from the high school mindset of ‘do what the teacher wants’ to ‘explain to the teacher what I wanted to do.’
At one point during the month, I had a conversation which made me feel like I’m not good enough. Like the effort I put into doing what I should and being good and working hard are all just not really enough and I need to be doing more, better, and I need to think of things differently and better and in ways that are fundamentally alien to me, and that wasn’t great. I’m trying to change on this front but it’s kind of hard to escape the feeling that I’m not good enough, that the things I’m needed to do, I can’t do.
But there’s some hope. At this point I’m writing this, I’ve pretty much written a thousand words every day and made progress on the PhD every single day. There have definitely been some days when, personal news reasons why, one or the other suffered, and those aren’t great. But the biggest fear I had this year was going to be that getting back into the habit of working on the grand project was going to be stymied by the first and most convenient excuse.
I can do this.
I can do this.