INSIDE

So I get excitable when I get excited about stuff. Take what follows with a grain of salt, I guess. But:

Games like INSIDE (and LIMBO, its predecessor) feel like they’re on the cusp of a new kind of storytelling medium. They’re not quite there, but they feel like they’re preparing the way.

Games-as-storytelling have mostly been attempts to make movies with playable elements divvied up with acting sequences. Movie clones in the same way that early movies were essentially filmed plays.

INSIDE has no cutscenes, no dialogue. No third dimension. Hell, your character doesn’t have a face. But he (or she) does have an arc, and it’s a good and tragic one. All told through running, hiding, climbing, swimming, and shoving objects around.

I’ve probably played LIMBO a dozen times even though I have every obstacle memorized. I started a new game of INSIDE about an hour after I finished my first run through. It’s grim and is brimming with black laughter, and yet something lyrical flutters at the center of it, too. Even when the especially gruesome third act kicks in.

These games are masterpieces. They’re on the verge of something new.

INSIDE is seven bucks on the App Store, but it's worth every penny.

The new J. Crew cover

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The High Mountain Vest with Hunkerdown Insulation, $87

Available colors: Manzanita Crucifixion, Cerulean Longing, Blood Oath (pictured)

Chinese Heaven, thought Milo. Cool.

God, he thought, when you loved someone, every day was Opposite Day. Being with them made you feel weak and also strong. They made you want to laugh and cry. Get dressed up and get undressed. You wanted to keep them forever and eat them like a bucket of cheese fries.

“I killed Buddha,” he told her.

—Michael Poore, Reincarnation Blues

Mischief Managed

This is an actual Freedom of Information Act request from a right-wing group looking to punish resistance:

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This is where I’m tempted to make an “am I high right now or is it everyone else” joke, but being high is way more fun than this, y’all.  

Though I’m hard pressed to think of a more appropriate nickname for their super-white, greed-fueled murdercult than “Death Eaters”.  

Leaving LA

I know he isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and a 13-minute acoustic song with no chorus certainly isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I’ve probably listened to this song more than any other single track in 2017.

Choosing “Pure Comedy” for the album’s title track was the right pick, as it's essentially the thesis statement for what follows. But it feels like this was the one he tore himself open for.

Listening to FJM is kind of like reading Vonnegut. There’s a constant thread of simultaneous contempt and love for our species. He sees that we’re hideous and beautiful all at once, and he doesn’t flinch from it. He sings to it.

Sometimes the cynicism on this album goes a bit overboard. I have to be careful about how often I listen to it, because optimism doesn’t come easily for me these days. But when I listen to it, I feel a little less alone in beholding the inherent absurdity and savagery of our existence and not knowing what to do.

In Which Luna Tells a Story

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Once upon a time there was a girl who had memories that followed her like shadows. They whispered like ghosts. She could not look them in the eye.

Once upon a time there was a man in a robe with a face like a vulture.

Once upon a time there was a woman on the ceiling.

Once upon a time there was black hair and black eyes and a righteous howl. Once upon a time a woman with hair like snakes said, She is mine, and she meant it. And then they took her away.

Once upon a time there was a dark tower that pierced the sky and turned everything gray.

Yes. This is all one story. This is my story. I just don’t know how it ends.

Once upon a time, something terrifying lived in the woods. Or perhaps the woods were terrifying. Or perhaps the whole world is poisoned with wickedness and lies, and it’s best to learn that now.

No, Fyrian, darling. I don’t believe that last bit, either.

—Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank the Moon

This book. This perfect, perfect book.

Achievement Unlocked:

In the last five days, I have:

  • Driven 650 miles
  • Made and blind-baked four pie crusts
  • Roasted and braised a turkey
  • Made sides and gravy for 16
  • Reserved enough broth to make turkey gravy salted caramels (YES I WILL, MOTHER FUCKERS)
  • Waited to hear if my nephew has a brain tumor (he doesn’t, hell yes)
  • Hosted family overnight
  • Run a frankly absurd number of dishwasher loads
  • Hand-washed all the family china
  • Done an introvert-month’s worth of socializing
  • Invented the unit of measurement known as the introvert-month
  • Eaten enough carbs that I feel Confession is warranted, despite my Protestant-bordering-on-Unitarian leanings
  • Made my father-in-law cry

Every inch worth it. Tomorrow, I return to work, so that I may rest.

guitar face dot jpeg

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If you want a good opening topic for a survey course in The Terribleness of White Folks, consider that we took one of the most profound and raw and beautiful expressions of suffering and longing our species has ever invented and smeared paunchy, goateed dads too old for rock and roll alllllllll over it.

If black culture is a fertile field, then historically, we have been the locusts.

Well, hesh mah mouf, yawl

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Northerner writers: Ah’m available tew help y’all larn how to raht the most authentic southern dialogue you ever did see, sugah.

I learned it from the fella what cooked in my mama’s summer kitchen, who picked a fine banjo and fed me on cracklins and the simple wisdom of these hills

Jesus made "It Follows" extra creepy

Discovered that the remotes for the TV and the sound bar sometimes set off the LED tape I used for my antique church window project in certain contexts. It does creative things with the color setup. This is what happened after my wife patiently requested that I turn down the subwoofer.

They're two different remotes but from the same manufacturer, so either they use the same frequency or else the IR receiver for the LED tape is super slutty.

Or it was a poooooltergeiiiiiiiist

Home again

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We have returned from vacation and I have fetched the still-recovering boy from his grandparents'.

I have been tempted to whine about the hundreds of miles I've driven the last two days. But I thought of how much he's quietly endured this week, painful heartworm treatments and prednisone and temporary relocation across state lines while I laid on a beach. Yet my boy still cried and damn near threw a hip wagging his tail when he laid eyes on me.

Some say that we don't deserve dogs. I say that we are all home, and that is what I needed most.

Nazi-killing video game adopts controversial anti-Nazi marketing stance →

This is a pretty crazy plot twist, y’all. Who could have expected this from a 36-year-long game franchise whose one theme is destroying a major existential threat to our species.

The one thing that gives me hope in this broccoli fart dutch oven of a year is the nigh-constant parade of evidence that Nazi sympathizers and “devil’s advocates” may be anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-human and anti-life, but they’re also incredibly stupid.

I have no time for video games, but I’m tempted to blow money on a console just to support this. Also Cuphead looks amazing.