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Comment on Climbing the Skyfrost Nail (a piece about jury service, essay collections, and Genshin Impact) in ~games
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Comment on Climbing the Skyfrost Nail (a piece about jury service, essay collections, and Genshin Impact) in ~games
Evie Link ParentUnfortunately, submitting this piece would absolutely ruin it, because it would necessitate the removal of the line "[Pham] gets published, I post to Tildes." :) All jokes aside, very kind of you...Unfortunately, submitting this piece would absolutely ruin it, because it would necessitate the removal of the line "[Pham] gets published, I post to Tildes." :)
All jokes aside, very kind of you to say. I think I'm happier posting my occasional videogame writing online to an audience of like ten people then I would be sending it to, like, Bullet Points trying to get an audience of like one hundred (and sixty dollars!). I already spent weeks editing this thing; I can't imagine how my perfectionism would metastasize through the process of querying!
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Climbing the Skyfrost Nail (a piece about jury service, essay collections, and Genshin Impact)
Having received a jury summons, and with my mental health being how it is, I recently took a bus to the nearby used bookstore. The rule of buying secondhand books is this: You must pretend, while...
Having received a jury summons, and with my mental health being how it is, I recently took a bus to the nearby used bookstore. The rule of buying secondhand books is this: You must pretend, while in the store, that your phone doesn’t exist; you must not come in looking for anything in particular; you must let yourself be guided by the titles and covers and the blurbs alone. So I followed my nose over to the “poetry and art criticism” shelf of the store (which, I am convinced, is to blame for my poor performance at parties) and started browsing.
There I found Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games and immediately developed a crush. Maybe it was the title, which seemed carefully engineered not to appeal to the general public. Or maybe it was the editor, Carmen Maria Machado, whose short story collection Her Body and Other Parties is a personal favourite. Either way, the anthology of nineteen pieces from nineteen authors about approximately nineteen games was in excellent condition, and had been marked down to eight dollars, so I added it to my little stack of purchases and wandered over to the checkout.
Like all anthologies, Critical Hits varies widely in quality across its component essays (and one comic). It starts strong: its introduction is a delight, with some of the best footnotes I’ve ever enjoyed. Likewise its first essay, Elissa Washuta’s “I Struggled a Long Time with Surviving,” an exploration of her experience with The Last of Us, pandemic, and intractable illness was deeply impactful and genuinely changed how I looked at the game. But this is par for the course with anthologies (at least, well-compiled ones) which know to dazzle you off the bat with their best material, so that you’re willing to endure their worst. Here, in my estimation, the worst is Anders Morson’s “The Cocoon,” which cites Brian Tomasik (one of those insufferable San Fransisco Rationalists) to argue that, in aggregate, it’s unethical to kill video game NPCs. Morson then goes on to list every Aliens game ever released, for six pages, with dazzling insights like “Aliens: Colonial Marines for PS3 Xbox (2013) is definitely an Aliens-y FPS.”
In aggregate, though, the anthology is more good than bad. Apart from “The Cocoon,” the worst essays here are mostly just mediocre, or meandering. And there are some true standouts here: Jamil Jan Kochai’s “Cathartic Warfare,” nat steele’s “I Was a Teenage Transgender Supersoldier.” And the reason I’m here, writing this essay of my own: Larissa Pham’s “Status Effect,” an exploration of depression, damage-over-time, and Genshin Impact.
Released globally in 2020 for PC and mobile devices, Genshin Impact is an action-adventure game which sees players assemble a four-person team from its extensive cast of characters and then wander out into its expansive open world to complete monsters, open quests, and kill chests (something like that, anyway). A live-service game, Genshin has seen regular map expansions and a remarkably stable playerbase for the last five years, and, like WoW before it, has spawned a wave of copycats hoping to take a bite out of the aging titan’s colossal corpus. Larissa Pham and I would have started playing Genshin at around the same time – she describes becoming obsessed with the game in the winter of 2020-2021; I first launched the game in February of 2021, in the icy depths of the pandemic, shortly after failing to kill myself, as something to do while waiting for the hospital bills to pour in.
In Status Effect, Pham recounts a minor controversy from the fall of 2021. Genshin’s meta had stagnated: a year into its lifespan, no one wanted to include healers on their team, when shielders were proactive and dodging was free. So the developers implemented a damage-over-time status effect called corrosion, inflicted by certain enemies and in certain phases of endgame content, which ignored shields and would wipe the whole team if not healed through. Genshin’s community was and is large enough that any kind of meta shift (however necessary) will spark outcry, controversy, and apocalypse prophets heralding doom (I was one of them: “What, am I just not supposed to use my Zhongli? No one’s gonna pull for fucking Kokomi”), but for Pham, that debuff gave her the language to think and speak about her depression more concretely.
Genshin has never given me the language I needed to think or speak about anything. Frankly, I don’t think the game’s story, which is consistently a mediocre slog (with a few bright spots) is capable at this point of doing anything interesting or novel. Even in Pham’s case, Genshin’s “corrosion” debuff might have been fungible with any damage-over-time debuff in any game – Pham just happened to be playing Genshin at the time when she needed it. But even saying this, even speaking as someone who cares about a game’s story more than any other element, I think Genshin is a fantastic game, in at least one major aspect: its exploration and world design.
Upon its announcement, Genshin was panned as “anime Breath of the Wild” a comparison enabled by its gliding and climbing and stamina meter and early-game monster designs and the shade of its grass. But cosmetic similarities aside, Genshin is actually doing something very different – very unique, I think. Genshin presents the player with an extremely large, colorful, and ever-expanding world, peppered with a truly mind-boggling amount of chests, environmental puzzles, and enemy camps. From any given point in the world, you can probably see several little leads to follow: a locked chest in a monster den; a blue faerie waiting to lead you to its court; a movement time trial; a floating elemental oculus. And once you pick one of those, and figure it out, you’ll once again be able to look around and see more chests to open, more stuff to collect, more things to do. So the world is incredibly dense with collectibles, but traversing it is surprisingly weighty. Climbing, gliding, running; all of these are either slow, or stamina-intensive, so you’ll move through the world at a light jog much of the time. This means that you can often see and plan a route to many different puzzle or collectibles before getting to them; it means that, instead of a constant stream of opening chests, each little dopamine hit is separated by a long breath, where you can appreciate the absolutely gorgeous world, and its stirring, melancholy music. And often, quests and puzzles and chests and collectibles will be laid out in a remarkably subtle web, designed to tug the player off the beaten path, towards some of the game’s most gorgeous sights, its most scenic vistas (of which there are plenty).
So maybe in terms of its exploration philosophy Genshin is an open-world collect-a-thon, more similar to a Super Mario Odyssey than a Breath of the Wild. But really, it’s nothing like either game, or anything else I’ve played; so much could be said about the game’s combat, its world quests, its approach to rewards, the way the game’s levelling systems encourage diverse engagement with the open world. I’ll instead conclude with this: Genshin Impact has my favourite exploration experience of any game I’ve ever played, and nothing else really even comes close.
Early in the game’s lifespan (December 2020), the developers added the new Dragonspine region: a frozen mountain, home to the bones of dragons and the ruins of an ancient civilization, introducing lethal new mechanics as a way to shake up exploration. Arguably a precursor to corrosion, while in Dragonspine, a status effect called “sheer cold” would accumulate and, once maxed, drain your health at such a high rate that no shielding or healing could keep up. Getting wet would accelerate cold accumulation; eating hot foods, lighting fires, or standing near heat sources would slow or reverse it. It encouraged a different playstyle; beyond keeping a fire character on your team, sheer cold also encouraged players to explore more deliberately; to stay close to heat sources and not stray too far from the path.
In Dragonspine, the main plot involves restoring an ancient relic called the Skyfrost Nail – an enormous pillar, shattered. Beginning at a base camp at Dragonspine’s foot, you slowly ascend the mountain, fighting monsters, exploring ancient, sealed laboratories, and maybe getting distracted to grab a chest here or a crimson agate there. On the way up, you learn fragments of the story of the ancient civilization that dwelt on Dragonspine, before it froze over; you hear of their research in alchemy, and the celestial nail that was flung down by the gods – to stop their research, before they climbed too high? It was this nail that froze Dragonspine, and somehow corrupted it; it is this nail that you find in broken fragments at Dragonspine’s peak. Beset by truly diabolical monster encounters designed to freeze you fast and absolutely ruin your afternoon, you thaw these fragments and watch as they ascend, reforming the nail, the enormous pillar hanging high above Dragonspine, ready to fall once more. You can, at last, ride the wind currents all the way up to stand on the head of the nail, at what was at the time the highest point in all of Tevyat, to gaze at the world around. All the lands accessible: Liyue and its harbor; Mondstadt and its cathedral, and beyond them, those inaccessible, not yet implemented into the game, represent as abstract hills, mountain, and sea, rolling endlessly into the distant grey fog.
It was February of 2021, and I had failed to die. Had been released from the hospital into the slushy, wet aftermath of a winter storm, with enough medication to last two more weeks and (though I didn’t know it at the time) enough debt to last through to this very day – if only because I stubbornly refuse to pay it. I returned to my on-campus apartment to discover that I had no heating, no power. Hot water, at least, for tea and baths and thin, meatless soups. According to the thermostat, my poorly-insulated home was hovering around 51°F, so I dragged my mattress off the bedframe, into the corner where it was warmer, sealed myself under a mountain of blankets, and opened my laptop.
I had meant to start drafting emails to professors, to explain my weeks-long absence and ask for extensions, grace, and leniency (all would eventually give it, and I didn’t even have to use the s-word, or show the doctors’ notes I had so dutifully accumulated). But in that moment, my hands were shaking from the cold and the anxiety: the knowledge that my life could be ruined, my academic scholarship lost, if any of them declined. So instead, I opened the app store, downloaded Genshin Impact, and, after a couple days of sleepless, bloodshot gaming sessions, climbed the Skyfrost Nail in Dragonspine.
Genshin might not have been capable of giving me the language to understand my experience with depression, dysphoria, and suicide, but it was certainly there when I needed it – the unique, frictional experience it provided offering a strange resonance with my own. And I kept playing it for a long time, perpetually enchanted by its world, its music, the waves of nostalgia and grief that would wash over me at the strangest times.
In the summer of 2021, I wrote a poem, for a poetry class, which began with the lines, “The economy being how it is / Instead of finishing school / I took a job this autumn at the Indiana Dunes.” It was a narrative poem, the only type of poem I’ve ever been able to write. In it, the speaker wanders around on the sandy shores of Lake Michigan in the aftermath of a heavy storm, picking their way around shredded volleyball nets and desolate lounge chairs, all half-buried under wet, sandy drifts. They’re looking for their phone, probably hopelessly lost amidst the dunes, but in the end, climbing Mt. Baldy (a very tall dune; not actually a mountain), they find that what they were searching for was not actually their phone – was, instead, perspective. A broader view of the world’s beauty. “On a clear day, from there, you can see all the way to Chicago,” they think, before beginning the climb. But in the end, reaching the top, the day is not clear, so they are left to “feast [their] eyes on the endless expanse of grey water.”
I must apologize for exposing you to my immature poetry, but the fact that I remember so many lines from that tiny, throwaway piece, from one of my least notable college classes, has always been suspicious to me. I suspect that it contains some sort of heartbreaking insight into my mindset at the time – a tragic longing for the picturesque (to quote a book I haven’t read). I played games where you climbed a mountain, wrote poems where the speaker climbed a dune; some nights, I walked a quarter mile to the parking garage near my apartment and climbed to the top level and leaned on the concrete railing and stared out through life-affirming chicken wire. I wanted to see in color, I suppose; to recapture the vividity of a world that I found increasingly exhausting, but mostly saw only greys: grey distance fog, grey water, and the grey existence of a college-town suburb, shining dully under the light-polluted grey sky.
In November of 2022, Genshin Impact released its 3.2 update “Akasha Pulses, the Kalpa Flame Rises,” which didn’t add any new regions to the map. Instead, it contained the concluding act of the Sumeru region’s main story quest, where the player teams up with a god, a couple academics, a dancer and a cop to fight the evils of the censored internet. For Genshin, this quest (and its preceding acts) were well above par, featuring (among other strengths) actual themes, and a plot that went beyond its gnostic inspirations. So, sure, 3.2 was a timely, relatively compelling update. It was also the update where I quit playing Genshin Impact – for good, I thought. There is simply only so much exploration, questing and combat that can be done in the same world, structure and systems before a work of art overstays its welcome. It wasn’t with any malice that I quit Genshin – I had simply had enough, and that was that.
My life had changed a great deal in the intervening period. I had finished college, moved cities, learned to cook, become a woman. Gotten a second dose of the COVID vaccine, the day before the move, and spent the entire ride to my new home feeling miserably ill because of it.
Around the same time, Carmen Maria Machado and J. Robert Lennon, compilers for Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games would have been working on their collection. It’s a collection that lives in the shadow of COVID-19 – almost every piece here, you can detect the pandemic’s penumbra (if it isn’t explicitly mentioned). For a lot of people, the pandemic was isolating, lonely, cold. For writers, it might have been that too, but we are solitary creatures, and the thing it gave us was, most of all, time: to play games, to write or fail to write, to think, to spiral.
Perhaps to counteract this spiral, Graywolf Press, a Minnesota-based not-for-profit publishing house, spent the pandemic hosting “cute mental health cocktail hours.” Lennon was there, Machado was there (my beloved Her Body and Other Parties was published by Graywolf) and it was there that Critical Hits was conceptualized.
“What we wanted to do was have a really diverse group of writers to provide a very diverse perspective of gaming, by writing about games however they want. We sort of gave them free rein,” Machado says, in an interview she and Lennon gave to Dazed Digital. “It was wild how people were like, ‘Oh my God, yes!’ Everything that came in was so good and so interesting and so different. It was a really extraordinary group of artists who had so many things to say.”
I don’t know how Larissa Pham, who wrote my favourite essay in the collection, first became attached to it. Shockingly, there aren’t that many interviews or monographs out there describing the creation process for Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games, a book with fewer than 500 ratings on Goodreads. Pham has written a smattering of fiction, nonfiction and creative nonfiction; essays, short stories, criticism. Avant-garde poetry, presented on an interactive github website. Kinky lesbian erotica. A cultural commentary about tradwives and baking. She also, at least for a while, played Genshin Impact, at the same time I and everyone else did. I am struck by the strange syzygy of our experiences. Pham graduated Yale; I went to a state school. She gets published; I post to Tildes. She teaches classes; I am constantly struck by how much I have to learn. But in the winter of 2020-2021, both of us, grappling with our respective illnesses, crossed paths with this game, and it was there for us when we needed it.
In January of 2025, I bought and read Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games. In early February, instilled with a sense of nostalgia for a game I hadn’t touched in years, and tired of playing Shadow of the Erdtree (another game with excellent exploration of a very different kind) I downloaded the HoyoPlay launcher and, with it, Genshin Impact.
Logging in, I was greeted with an embarrassment of little red exclamation marks, attached to almost every UI element, there to helpfully explain what I had missed, what was new, and all the crazy exciting retention-driving bonuses the game would give me to help me catch up. According to the huge new blank spaces on the map, I had many more regions to explore; according to the quest log, many more mediocre stories to sit through. According to my backpack, enough saved-up resources from before I had quit to immediately acquire and build the 5-star character Arlecchino, the only female character in the game – out of some sixty, now – who could plausibly be described as handsome (her vest buttons on the left). Perhaps I should have been overwhelmed. But sinking back into Genshin’s loop felt like coming home. Swimming through the new undersea regions, Fontaine and the Sea of Bygone Eras, offered a welcome twist to what was still a fundamentally fantastic exploration loop. Quests like “The Dirge of Bilquis” and “Masquerade of the Guilty” might not have been brilliant, but featured gorgeous locations, entertaining set pieces, and even an excellent VA performance or two.
Apparently, I was coming back at a bad time. Shortly before I collected my Arlecchino, a new character had been released: Mavuika. I never got around to playing the quests where she was featured, but apparently she was poorly written and presented a real problem for Genshin’s balance. Mavuika, you see, has a magical motorbike that a). Doesn’t really fit with Genshin’s usual magitech aesthetics and b). Removes all discernible friction from exploration, with its ability to drive super fast, climb walls, ride on water, and even, for a short time, fly. I was slightly scandalized when I heard about her, frankly.
“Sure,” I thought, “This doesn’t affect me, I’m never going to use her. But if a new player spends their limited resources to get Mavuika (a smart decision; she is, in addition to everything else, a very strong DPS, powercreeping Arlecchino) won’t that ruin the game for them? Won’t her ability to bypass all the exploration challenges in the game take away the one thing that makes it so special?” It felt like the game jumping the shark, releasing a broken character to make a quick buck at the expense of its long-term health. But truthfully, I was a tourist in Genshin this time, coming back to gawk at how it had changed after years of absence. I have no real stake in its balance. I don’t really recommend anyone play it. What happens to the meta and monetization of this game I once loved terribly is now water off a dyke’s back.
Things that I used to get very up-in-arms about no longer really bother me. I’m sometimes unsure whether that’s a result of healing or hypernormalisation.
I had jury duty at the Seattle Municipal Court that month, a boxy building downtown. Had to report in at nine in the morning, riding the bus, shaking slightly from the cold and the anxiety. Of course, it’s not yet illegal to be a transsexual in one of the most wonderfully LGBT-indifferent cities on the planet, but the current political climate lends itself to overthinking.
Potential jurors are to report to the eleventh floor, to an airy, high-ceilinged, window-walled space crammed with chairs and tables and an attached kitchenette – the vending machines offering instruction on how to contact the county for reimbursement. We were to be paid twenty-five dollars per day (plus transit and food costs, if applicable). We were to watch informational videos, fill out cursory forms, and read quietly until called. It was all terribly adolescent, terribly bland. I found myself ruminating on the abstract sculpture pieces hanging from the ceiling, wondering whether their creators had intended them for this space, or whether they had been sentenced to hang here – as a punishment for reckless driving, maybe? What kind of cases even get tried in municipal court? Eventually, I went out onto the rooftop terrace, with only my coffee to protect me from the chilly, cloudy February weather.
To the west, I could see out the Port of Seattle, its great cranes priestly in their red and white liveries, their still solemnity. A container ship lay still in the bay, making no progress to its destination. And nearer: a sliver of downtown. An empty pit, filled with the refuse of aborted construction, bags of trash, tiny blue dumpsters. Graffiti, content indiscernible. Brown brick buildings; a yellow taxi (!) threading between them. A whole city, half asleep, stirring amid the late morning fog. It started to rain, a miserable spitting drizzle, and I scurried inside to protect my book and my temperamental hair.
This February, on my last day playing Genshin Impact, I received a DM from a random, low-level stranger named Quentin. “HELP!!” it said. I joined his world in co-op mode.
Quentin was exploring Dragonspine. When I arrived, his shiny new (low-level) Mavuika was frozen solid by an ice mage, a couple steps away from drowning in a nearby pool, like my own characters had been four years ago. There are some challenges, it seems, that even the most broken character cannot bypass.
Quentin and I summited Dragonspine together. I was shocked to discover that, even after four years, I still remembered the climb almost perfectly. Still remembered the jagged ruins; the wind currents; the terrifying monsters that had killed me over and over again. I hadn’t resorted to messaging strangers to defeat them, but it’s pretty common to do so – new players almost always struggle with Dragonspine. And so there I was, the helpful stranger this time, jogging forward, activating waypoints, lighting fires, killing chunky minibosses with a single unbuffed normal attack while Quentin stood behind me and put motivational stickers in the chat (stickers are the de facto mode of communication in Genshin co-op, as it’s never a surety that any two players will share a language). Quentin was there – why else? – to repair the skyfrost nail. Sure, his Mavuika could motorbike faster than my characters could climb, but still he slowed down so that we could make the ascent side-by-side. And when he seemed to struggle with the light puzzling involved in thawing the nail fragments, I sat my Arlecchino down next to important clues that he was missing and posted slightly stern stickers until he noticed.
At the end of the cutscene where the pillar at last rises into the sky, Quentin and I climbed and ran and rode the wind currents up to stand on the head of the Skyfrost Nail. We couldn’t stay long; sheer cold accumulates fast up there, and neither Quentin nor I had brought a healer or a portable stove. But we still stayed, as long as we could, staring out over Teyvat.
Over the course of over four years of updates, scenery that had once been indistinct rolling hills and sea, fading into fog, had been replaced by new regions, sprawling far beyond our view. Quentin and I could just make out, in the distance, the towering Inazuman mountains, crested by the blossoming sacred sakuras of the Grand Narukami Shrine. The curving tree-city from which sprouts the Sumeru Akadeymia. The baroque arches and elevated crystalline waterways of the Court of Fontaine. And more besides – landmarks I had explored, that Quentin might one day explore: a view onto the entire world with all its colors and its vistas, chests and quests and every artifice of gameplay erased by distance.
Quentin teleported away to warmer pastures and I remained standing there, struck still and wordless, once again, by the syzygy.
He and I will never interact again (shortly, he would say, “Thank you Father” – a title often used for Arlecchino – and then kick me from the world). But for that brief moment, our experiences came into alignment with Genshin Impact, across time and very possibly national borders. I know even less about Quentin than I do Larissa Pham, but he and I at the very least got to share that moment of awe and wonder at the top of the world. I wonder what it meant to him.
In the prologue to Critical Hits, Carmen Maria Marchado writes about her experiences being introduced to new games by friends and partners: “As I keep writing I am struck… by the intimacy of the form; the way the experience of it is specific, even erotic. What did it mean to receive someone’s tutelage? To let yourself be watched? To open yourself up to new ways of understanding? To die over and over again?” Perhaps Critical Hits’ greatest strength, its most distinct quality as an art object, across almost every piece within, is that peculiar intimacy. To watch writers and critics open themselves up to games; then, through those games, open themselves up to you. In much the same way Quentin did by inviting me into his world, Pham and Villarreal and Adjei-Brenyah and Washuta and, yes, even Morson invite us into their worlds, show us how video games refracted their experiences to help them understand themselves with new vividity and clarity.
I feel a little guilty to have, once again, dedicated so much time and mental energy to Genshin Impact, a game which arguably does not deserve it. While playing it this year, and since then, I have played Signalis and Lies of P and 1000xResist and (fellow gacha game) Reverse:1999, have read Borges and Dillard and Ian Reid – artists and works that are considerably more unified and artistically compelling than Genshin. But none of them hit me quite as hard as this 2020 open-world live-service Chinese gacha game; none came at just the right moment, to connect with my particular experiences, my past; to color my vision.
My name didn't get called for jury duty, so at 3PM I rode the bus home (stopping briefly for bread and doughnuts at the bakery in order to earn the approval of the women I live with). Genshin Impact no longer lives on my computer. Once again, I got what I needed out of it, and then let it go. Having finished writing this piece, Critical Hits will be put on my bookshelf, probably never to be touched again. But as we move forward into an uncertain future, these small, impactful experiences, insignificant though they were, will continue to live with me. And if you read through this entire meandering essay, maybe some small fragment of them can live with you, too: proof of our shared essence, an invitation into my world.
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Comment on Tildes Minecraft Survival in ~games
Evie Link ParentEighteen people have played on the server this month (excluding those with a playtime of less than one hour). Many more who, like myself, played a lot in the past but haven't recently.Eighteen people have played on the server this month (excluding those with a playtime of less than one hour). Many more who, like myself, played a lot in the past but haven't recently.
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Comment on Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy under fire at Warner Bros. amid box office flops: ‘We didn’t want to fail’ David Zaslav in ~movies
Evie Link ParentIt's not just a marketing thing, though. There's also an artistic reason to seek feedback (and test screenings are a decent way to get a lot of feedback). You want to know whether your scenes are...It's not just a marketing thing, though. There's also an artistic reason to seek feedback (and test screenings are a decent way to get a lot of feedback). You want to know whether your scenes are working, whether audiences are responding the way you want them to to certain characters or plotlines. Whether your subtext is comprehensible! When you, as an artist, have been working on an art object for a long time (for movies, often years and years!) it kind of desensitizes you to the quality of the thing, makes it almost impossible to evaluate or analyze it, to determine whether it's working. Test audiences can help with that.
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Comment on Race against the regime: The 1936 Olympics, and the Nazi rise to power in ~sports
Evie Link ParentOkay! Then, I set you free. You're no longer required to watch it! I think if hydn were here to defend himself, he might say that what he's getting at is that America, and by extension the world,...Okay! Then, I set you free. You're no longer required to watch it!
I think if hydn were here to defend himself, he might say that what he's getting at is that America, and by extension the world, enabled Nazi violence by treating Hitler's regime as unremarkable. An ideology built on cruelty and bigotry, and we participated in their displays of nationalistic power and "unity." And maybe the reason that this happened is that American society and Nazi society were not, at their core, all that different. The Olympics, then, were less the cause of the Holocaust and more a representation of the sicknesses in the world that brought it about. Unfortunately this is an argument he makes mostly through subtext; I think he would have done better to be much more explicit.
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Comment on Race against the regime: The 1936 Olympics, and the Nazi rise to power in ~sports
Evie Link"Would the Holocaust still have happened if the US boycotted the 1936 Olympics?" Though I think YouTuber and amateur sports historian hydn (one of my favorite of Jon Bois's children) fails to..."Would the Holocaust still have happened if the US boycotted the 1936 Olympics?" Though I think YouTuber and amateur sports historian hydn (one of my favorite of Jon Bois's children) fails to convincingly build a case around this provocative question, his fictionalized (or, creative non-fictionalized?) retelling of the events surrounding those games is a compelling piece: one that builds imagined conversations and scenes from the accounts and experiences of real historical players, to draw strong and stark parallels between the Nazi rise to power and our own American political reality.
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Race against the regime: The 1936 Olympics, and the Nazi rise to power
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Comment on Anyone interested in trying out Kagi? (trial giveaway: round #2) in ~tech
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Comment on What are your personal reading "rules?" in ~books
Evie LinkI keep a folder of browser bookmarks called "Art," which functions as a bit of a cross-media watchlist for books, games, movies, TV, exhibits, whatever I've seen mentioned or alluded to across the...I keep a folder of browser bookmarks called "Art," which functions as a bit of a cross-media watchlist for books, games, movies, TV, exhibits, whatever I've seen mentioned or alluded to across the internet that looks interesting. I have a physical TBR shelf in my bedside table, and whenever it starts looking a bit empty, I open up the Art folder and look for books to fill it back up. Trying to get a variety of genres and such.
As far as actual reading goes, every evening around eight I'll have a hot beverage (usually hot cocoa; sometimes coffee) and sit down with a book and read for at least an hour. I read pretty fast -- 100pgs/hr, +/-20 depending on the book, so I can get through books pretty quickly this way. I have ADHD, so what usually happens is that the first night with a new book I'm struggling to pay attention and get through the hour, but by maybe the third night I'm usually obsessed and reading for multiple additional hours to get to the ending. I try to think a lot about a finished book before starting the next one, getting my feelings about it in order. Sometimes I'll type a little analysis into a throwaway Google doc if it's hard to get my thoughts together. Then in a couple of days I'll pick the next book off the shelf -- usually something of a different genre from what I've just read, you know, variety being the sauce of joy and such. It's very rare for me to DNF a book -- I think I'm pretty good at picking them so that even the ones I don't like are at least interesting.
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Comment on What are your favorite books with an unreliable narrator? in ~books
Evie (edited )LinkThe Locked Tomb series is my current favorite example of this. It's an unreliable narrator bonanza, where each of the three narrators are unreliable in different ways and for different reasons. In...The Locked Tomb series is my current favorite example of this. It's an unreliable narrator bonanza, where each of the three narrators are unreliable in different ways and for different reasons. In the first book, Gideon the Ninth, the titular perspective character Gideon is a himbo who's constantly left out of the loop. Not that she ever cared to be in the loop; there are hot women afoot! Who cares about a dumb "magical trial" or "murder mystery?" Occupying Gideon's perspective, we see an inversion of the typical mystery formula. In the classic mystery novel, we follow a detective, who accumulates information and solves the case. But Gideon mostly just bumbles around while other smarter and more invested people get shit done. Gideon is regularly stumbling into key evidence and building relationships with crucial characters, while completely failing to understand their significance. This aligns her with the reader, who will almost certainly be as bewildered by the central mystery of the novel, and as astonished by its resolution.
Gideon's sequel, Harrow the Ninth, introduces a new protagonist, Harrow, quite possibly the least reliable narrator of all time. As a result of multiple overlapping cognitive issues (to say the least) Harrow is perpetually unsure of her own sanity, and the facts of the world around her. The reader is trapped in her head by the unusual second-person narration, and forced to experience her unravelling first-hand, through sleepless weeks, hallucinated corpses, and total nervous collapse. About half of Harrow's first two acts is devoted to an entirely unrecognizable retelling of Gideon the Ninth, with a different central mystery, and different characters, and it threatens to unseat the foundation of the entire series. Worse, there's never a sense of dramatic irony, a feeling that even if Harrow doesn't know what's going on, at least you as a reader do. No -- Harrow is a powerful space necromancer, surrounded by several even more powerful space necromancers. It's hardly ever clear whether Harrow is hallucinating, or being gaslit, or glimpsing something she wasn't supposed to. When, at last, the novel's final chapters resolve reality at last -- answering almost every question, eliminating almost every seeming contradiction -- the prevailing feeling is one of relief, the relief a wrung-out sponge must feel after being put away. If Gideon is about a character who knows too little Harrow is about one who knows too much, and who can't possibly trust herself enough to hold it all in her head. It's a wonderful nightmare of a book -- author Tamsyn Muir has said that she relied on her own experience living with schizophrenia to write it, which absolutely tracks.
I won't go into the third book, Nona the Ninth, though its narrator is once again unreliable in new and interesting ways. It's a great series for getting immersed in interesting perspective characters with unique limitations.
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
Evie Link ParentMouthwashing is just a really taut, well-written game. It's kind of a horror walking sim, not much gameplay, but the character-driven story is so strong (and so unsettling) that it really sticks...Mouthwashing is just a really taut, well-written game. It's kind of a horror walking sim, not much gameplay, but the character-driven story is so strong (and so unsettling) that it really sticks with you. It's a twisty and grueling experience that only takes like 3 hours. If you've played SOMA or Signalis, those are the closest comparisons I know of.
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Comment on What are some books for which the critical/public opinion has flipped over time? in ~books
Evie Link ParentYou know, this is actually also why I read A Little Life: in order to have a take on the book. I do regret it -- again, this is a 700 PAGE NOVEL, and these are not light, breezy pages. But it's...You know, this is actually also why I read A Little Life: in order to have a take on the book. I do regret it -- again, this is a 700 PAGE NOVEL, and these are not light, breezy pages. But it's not just the length. I think when you're reading something "because of the controversy" you're already coming at the text in a way that isn't conducive to really enjoying it. It's like, when I'm reading this book, I'm not buying into it, I'm not immersed in its world, I'm not thinking about it as independent art -- I'm thinking about it as the impetus for Andrea Long Chu's Pulitzer-winning skewer. Honestly there was almost no chance I actually enjoyed this book -- even if my view of it ended up more positive than most critics'.
I'm going through this right now with Shadow of the Erdtree, funny enough. While the combat and boss design remain great it has reproduced and amplified my problems with Elden Ring's base game to a point I'm sick of it just a few hours in. But I'm pushing myself to finish it, if for no other reason than to have the ability to talk about Shadow of the Erdtree. I think it's a toxic trait, because I would literally rather be playing Genshin Impact (never a good sign) -- and also, there are lots of great books still on my physical TBR shelf that are way less than 700 pages, like I'm looking over at Ian Reid's latest horror novel (which I know I'll have a good time with) and feeling guilty because I instead read A Little Life, a bad time twice as long.
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Comment on What are some books for which the critical/public opinion has flipped over time? in ~books
Evie LinkOne of the most interesting examples of this, imo, is the re-evaluation of former BookTok darling A Little Life, which originally launched to a positive, if muted, reception in 2015. Written by...- Exemplary
One of the most interesting examples of this, imo, is the re-evaluation of former BookTok darling A Little Life, which originally launched to a positive, if muted, reception in 2015. Written by Hanya Yanagihara, this 700-page epic tells the story of Jude, a star-crossed gay man who struggles with innumerable traumas as he and his three friends build their lives in New York. I have, like many of this novel's detractors, read A Little Life, and that's sort of the problem, I think. What we have here seems to be a very niche read that got popular due to book influencers, because the book is, at least nominally, very tragic, very maudlin, very emotionally affecting. If you read it uncritically, it's easy to be swept up in the melodrama, to be drawn into Jude's story and to feel every stone and arrow that strikes him. But, increasingly, the book was going viral; getting recommended to people who weren't going to read it uncritically.
I'm not actually sure what the inflection point was for this book in the public mind, if there was one, but my memory tells me it must have been Andrea Long Chu's Vulture article "Hanya's Boys." Ostensibly a review of Hanya Yanagihara's subsequent novel To Paradise, the article spends the majority of its gratuitous length eviscerating A Little Life. In Chu's estimation, the novel, and Yanagihara's other work, essentially amounts to no more than yaoi torture porn written by a vainglorious straight woman: appropriative, gauche, and without literary merit.
The subsequent popular reevaluation of A Little Life was not kind to the novel nor its author. The most sticky and potent criticism, in my opinion, is that the book essentially comes across as a pro-suicide polemic: Jude's life is so tragic (so comically, improbably tragic) that suicide, within the novel's procedural rhetoric, seems to be the only hope of escape or freedom. But at the same time, I think Chu and many of Yanagihara's critics have simply run into a novel that, while well-written, isn't for them, and have fallen into the trap of spinning their reasonable dislike into sanctimonious moralizing.
My personal disclosure: I like reading webfiction where horrible things happen to innocent, unassuming dykes, who have no choice but to bear their tortures with the gelid composure of a soldier in front of a firing squad. Sometimes, this takes the form of literal smut; other times, the slightly more sociable Doomed Yuri... trope? genre? It's a niche thing, only occasionally breaking into monetized, traditionally published art: books like The Locked Tomb; games like Reverse:1999 appropriate a degree of gratuitous sapphic misery to make a compelling thematic point (and we love them for it!) When I read A Little Life, I read it as a child of the MLM (men-loving-men) version of this tradition. Sure, it's yaoi torture porn written by a straight woman that wouldn't be out-of-place in the "Dead Dove, Do Not Eat" tag on AO3. But that's kind of the point. Is it gratuitous? Yes, but in an almost playful, almost absurd way, that obviously found an eager audience (at first).
What separates A Little Life from the other stories I mention, I think, is a few things. First, it's undeniable that most sapphic torture porn is written by queer women, about queer women, for queer women. Whereas the MLM equivalent is also mostly written by women, for women, and thus commodifies gayness in a way that can feel pretty gross. Second, the thematic points other published works make with their "torture-of-gays" often feel much more salient. Reverse:1999 tells a story where two women cannot be in the same room without planning their future together, in a world where the future is literally being destroyed by a supernatural thunderstorm, and people are constantly wrenched apart by their violent ideologies. All in order to tell a story that embraces existentialism while rejecting absurdism; that portrays both the value of relationships and the way that they can be warped into something poisonous under the weight of marginalization and a culture of violence. The Locked Tomb depicts a slew of codependent, mutually destructive, manipulative queer relationships as an explicit exploration of the many ways love can be unequal, painful, and cruel. A Little Life tells a story where horrible things happen to gay men: at best, as a source of catharsis for the reader; at worst, as an argument in favor of suicide. It feels much less subtle, compelling and incisive than the things I'm tempted to compare it to; less literature, more (largely nonsexual) smut.
And since my freak doesn't match Yanagihara's, and since this is a novel that is marketed with blurbs and reviews (instead of online tags like "Major Character Death" and "CW: Child Sexual Abuse") it was effectively Trojan-horsed into the hands of a lot of readers who were never going to like it, no matter how clean the prose, no matter how sparkly the gay suffering. A Little Life is well-written for its genre but that genre is also why the plot is often propelled by seemingly random catastrophes, like a fatal car crash, with no narrative justification. That genre is also why most of the side characters' identities seem to decohere as the novel progresses, only being treated as important insofar as they lead to more suffering. And it's why reading the book often feels like watching a maladjusted child torture dolls with a carpet knife she stole from her dad's toolbox. In short, it's why A Little Life is, unless you're the narrow target audience, an unlikeable novel.
I wish I had never read this book, but it's not really the author's fault that I did. In an alternate universe, one where A Little Life was never a BookTok sensation -- one where, hell, maybe it was never published; maybe it stayed online, and got seventy-five comments and a hundred and thirty kudos -- it could have suffered its deserved fate: a life of being loved by the people close to it, and unknown to me and everyone else. But instead, it got popular, and so now there are Vulture articles and video essays and probably also interminable webforum comments calling for it to be shot behind the shed.
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Comment on What are you reading these days? in ~books
Evie (edited )LinkI've finished three books this week. Reading instead of using Reddit or YouTube, which has probably been good for my mental health. I'm still thinking my way through LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven....I've finished three books this week. Reading instead of using Reddit or YouTube, which has probably been good for my mental health.
I'm still thinking my way through LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven. This is my second book of hers, and I have to confess that it's my second time liking her ideas more than her execution. While the way she explores dreaming, and the concept of God, and our responsibility to humanity were all thought-provoking and engaging, I felt like the book was building towards a twist or a climax or SOMETHING interesting on the plot front that never really arrived. This book simply feels way too short to squeeze in all its themes and its ever-shifting worldbuilding and its sections of surreal, perfectly dreamlike prose and then still have room for a compelling story. Anyway I don't want to go too far into criticizing the plot and characters while the book is still half-formed in my mind so I'll leave it at that.
White Noise by Don DeLillo has essentially no plot, but in this case I don't actually mind it. If LeGuin's exploration of dreams was thought-provoking and prescient, White Noise, a story in which a Hitler professor and his family are largely unaffected by all the pain and tragedy happening around them, is the most prescient book I've ever read. Through a series of loosely connected vignettes that only barely manage to coalesce into literary staples like "acts" or "a climax," DeLillo paints a picture of a group of characters that are bizarre and eclectic in the ways that everyone who ever lived is bizarre and eclectic, with their habits and obsessions and esoteric family rituals. All in the context of a modern society that is increasingly full of trauma, experienced through radio and television and, increasingly, first-hand: random, senseless, godless and eventually, boring and non-noteworthy, so that terror and Death become a kind of white noise. White Noise. Because, get it, that's the title of the book.
I deserve to be shot.
Anyway what really makes this strange and meandering book work is the dialogue, which is often lyrical and absurd and, when necessary tinged with gravitas. Characters are given life as much by their linguistic quirks as they are by rote description. This mastery of dialogue lends certain scenes a rhythm so strong and distinct that they're stuck in my head after one read, like a song where you can only remember the tune and a couple jumbled lyrics (something about "Elvis?" And "Hitler's mother?") from the hook. This book has been incredibly sticky, has given me the language (or at least the tempo) to express my feelings about modern life.
That said it must be acknowledged that I am enjoying having read the book much more than I did actually reading it. While some scenes are hypnotic, and while some sequences (the Airborne Toxic Event) are narratively gripping, much of this book felt like a bit of a meandering slog. If you read books for the plot alone, don't bother with this one! It's sort of everything else that works here for me, and makes up for it.Finally I read P. Djèlí Clark's A Master of Djinn, which is the most Normal Book out of the three. It's a straightforward-ish magical murder mystery, about a dykeish detective in early 20th-century Cairo, unravelling murky plots in her fashionable suits with the help of her loyal gal pals. The whole thing has a very Sherlock Holmes feel, not only in terms of the mystery elements but also in the setting; the way the author incorporates, subverts and engages with elements of history and folklore, in much the same way Doyle did with Mormonism or the KKK (Clark, of course, is much more deft and incisive). And on a plot level, there's nothing to complain about; structurally, this is a very sound novel, which pays off everything introduced, which proceeds neatly from high point to low; from discovery to setback; from flaw to growth; from question to solution to twist to climax in a way that is perhaps a little predictable but also satisfying and unimpeachable. Not that the book is without frustrations. The prose here feels a little lean and undercooked. There's a sense of tightness; of intentional minimalism; of the kind of blunt straightforwardness of description, the obviation of subtext, that often characterizes the noir genre and its pulpiest relatives. But Clark's style here, for me, lacks some of the sparkle, the charm, the self-awareness that makes that style work. Often it means that the book just comes across a little YA, a bit untrusting of its reader. This occasionally extends to the novel's themes. Here, Clark deals with multiculturalism, with colonialism, with slavery and subjugation, with religion, with censorship, with dehumanization, with the problems with the police. It's a lot to tackle, and not everything is examined thoroughly here. In particular I found Clark's perspective on feminism to be shallow. I read somewhere that he wrote this novel because he wanted to give his daughters a wider variety of literary role models; more characters to enjoy and empathize with. And in this he succeeds -- the rare "straight man writes lesbians well" -- but also, like ALL his female characters make unexamined throwaway jokes about how dumb and emotional men are. So, you know, they're all sexist. Ugh.
Issues aside, this was a thoroughly engaging and propulsive read. I particularly enjoyed Clark's worldbuilding here; his magical, steampunk Cairo is vivid, imaginative, and actually compelling as an alternate history setting, offering a rich canvas for more stories -- Clark has already written multiple short pieces set in this world with these characters, which from the one I read are even more "Sherlock," even tighter and more satisfying.
This was a strong debut, and makes me sort of passively interested in more from this author, if I'm in need of a particular kind of read. -
Comment on Tildes Minecraft Survival Weekly in ~games
Evie Link ParentI'll have to disagree! If anyone can be credited for the idea, it's Monet! And you two did almost all the work anyway; it doesn't take a genius to make a schematic file. But thank you so much for...I'll have to disagree! If anyone can be credited for the idea, it's Monet! And you two did almost all the work anyway; it doesn't take a genius to make a schematic file. But thank you so much for your efforts!
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Comment on Tildes Minecraft Survival Weekly in ~games
Evie Link ParentHey! Thanks for checking. If I was mistaken, and there's no absolute difference between the heights, then the alternate build height and location are APPROVED. Edit for clarity: the cobblestone is...Hey! Thanks for checking. If I was mistaken, and there's no absolute difference between the heights, then the alternate build height and location are APPROVED. Edit for clarity: the cobblestone is a guide line only and should go outside of the map area in the real build
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Comment on Tildes Minecraft Survival Weekly in ~games
Evie Link ParentThat's why I wanted to build it, haha! When I originally made it last year, I rebound "pick block" to left click. Since you can pick a Litematica schematic the dithering was essentially a...That's why I wanted to build it, haha! When I originally made it last year, I rebound "pick block" to left click. Since you can pick a Litematica schematic the dithering was essentially a non-issue for me
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Comment on Tildes Minecraft Survival Weekly in ~games
Evie (edited )Link ParentWell if you INSIST here's the schematic: (bitwarden send) I do appreciate the offer but again please don't feel any obligation. In particular collecting the materials would be very onerous, since...Well if you INSIST here's the schematic: (bitwarden send)
I do appreciate the offer but again please don't feel any obligation. In particular collecting the materials would be very onerous, since the main ingredients are terracotta and concrete. It's a flat schematic designed to be built at sea level btw
@GravySleeve for you as well -
Comment on Tildes Minecraft Survival Weekly in ~games
Evie Link ParentIt was a 2x3. I wouldn't inflict that on you! But I do appreciate the offerIt was a 2x3. I wouldn't inflict that on you! But I do appreciate the offer
Thanks for sharing about your experience with Quake! I feel a little less self-conscious posting my long rambling essays here thanks to all your very nice comments on them...
There was some critic whose name I can't be bothered to look up right now, who argued that, in essence, art isn't a physical object -- a painting, or a book, or a disc -- rather; art is created at the moment of interaction between the art object and the viewer. They were writing in a time before video games, I think, but even then they recognized how your own biases, personalities, lives, moods, modes of being -- all the stuff that makes up a person -- can shape your experience with a work as much as a work itself. More so now, that so much art is explicitly designed to be interactive (and not just games, either; possibly as a consequence of postmodernism, even some books, or galleries, or even poetry -- like Pham's -- are designed to be interactive).
Personally I just have a hard time internalizing that. I sometimes feel very young and silly, for liking the art I like, or caring about some things as much as I do. But I'm glad I'm not alone in having these sort of 'lowbrow' formative works :)