Spring has sprung and with it the first thirty degree day since February. Oh, that’s not a hot hot day, but it is a hot day. I sit on that evening and sweat slightly and wrinkle my nose as I consider the wrapup for this month, almost two weeks out from it. Let’s get into it.
Normally I open this with a piece about the Game Pile articles that went up this month, presented as a bulleted list. Game Piles go up on (my) Friday mornings, which means that September had five of them, and those five lined up to put videos in three. I had planned all along to, at some point this year, put my three existing Commander Keen articles together into a script to make a big compilation video for my friends who Don’t Like Reading So Much, and then turn that into an easy video.
It was not easy.
It wasn’t easy because the first ‘article’ I wrote on Commander Keen was a rambling voiceover practicing the academic study of Stimulated Recall, which is super interesting but not helpful for script building. That meant instead of having scripts for four of seven games I actually had more like two and a half. That means this video features some of the most stuff I’ve ever put together for a single video. The script is over eight thousand words, about twenty pages of text with the notes appended. Normally, a video is about one thousand words, so that’s why it’s such a big beast of a story. I had to go break out some academic books and teach myself how an EGA interpreter acted so I could put that same idea away in a tidy fashion. I actually consulted with my friend Decay about my description of EGA because my first parse of it was just uh
Wrong?
Anyway, that’s the big Game Pile article this month and I did four other ones, which included two other videos:
- Les Manley Shouldn’t Be For Sale, an updated video about a game I still want to talk about for how awful it is
- Ring Fit Adventures, an incredibly painful diary of my relationship to my own physical body
- The Wingspan video, where I took an old article about Wingspan and updated it the consider new experiences and the beautiful steam version of the game
- Brew, a chat with Fox about a really nice looking board game that hides some brass knuckles under its coat
- And of course, the Commander Keen Retrospective, where I consider all six of the PC games about Commander Keen. Yes, there are more. No, I don’t know much about them.
Five Fridays doesn’t mean five mondays, though, and that means we get four Story Piles on:
- The Executioner and her Way of Life, a series I really liked and which has obvious problems like stupid outfits and the homophobia of its distribution service,
- Ya Boy Kongming, a series I really liked and which has obvious problems like stupid outfits and the homophobia of its distribution service,
- Nobody, a movie I really liked which has obvious problems like the glorification of masculine violence and the power inherent in the actions of the US state’s military arm
- Beck, an anime I watched because I wanted to tease Clae about one of the singers only to find that the series absolutely rocks, even with all its really uncomfortable gross stuff about women
What else did we do this month? Well, a chonker of an article about the Halfling Trade Houses in Cobrin’Seil in Piton, Jura, Carpathia, Northumbria, a piece about the strange symbolism of the Otyugh, a new D&D culture and the place they’re from, a alpha print of the game Feinting Couch if you’re down for that, two different game prototype concepts in Lysen Co and The Wandering Samurai, writing practice to reconsider how I describe characters in One Stone, a consideration of the work of Donald Norman, a truly painful introspection on my childhood church and who’s allowed to wield power over you, the academic consideration of autoconnoisseurship, and oh yeah Jimmy Buffet Died so I got to be full of feelings.
Not just Jimmy Buffett — he just got to be the centerpiece of a single article. This month also took Steven Harwell of Smash Mouth, a well intentioned idiot who made fun of DJ Khaled, and Sheldon Menery, the godfather of Commander magic.
It has been a rough one for me!
Uh anyway, here’s a shirt design I did.
You can get this design in a bunch of colours, I like it a lot. I mean to get stickers of it.
Then uh, what was there, uhm,
Jesus, we lost Paul Woseen as well.
You know what, fuck it:
The Screaming Jets scared the shit out of me growing up because they did a cover of Eve of Destruction that I heard that uh, I thought was literally a ‘next week’ thing.
It’s so weird to think that I was a Smash Mouth fan before Shrek. Before there was anything like the Smash Mouth ironic hatedom. All Star sings about global warming and our helplessness in the face of it. But this song, this version of a fuckin ‘ Neil Diamond song, I think genuinely elevates the whole thing.
God.
I had Astro Lounge on a casette.
I remember this chorus sending me into horrified clenches in the dark of my bedroom in the cult. Beyond the end, it spoke, and it knew something that I had never been told.
He is beyond the end, and his music is his long and beautiful wake. We can say goodbye, my friend.
Loved outlasts living.
Fuck.
Uh I’m fine.
It’s a marking period at work. I’m down because I feel like I’m failing to connect to students’ minds. I feel like I’m not good enough. I feel like bits of my world are collapsing and the body I inhabit is a meat husk that’s lost something vitally important because I didn’t love it enough to fix it.
I don’t feel good.
Very proud of the writing I did this month though.