Evie's recent activity
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Comment on Is it possible to not want to be happy? in ~talk
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
Evie LinkFor most of this week, I was playing Luna Abyss! Luna Abyss Where to start? This game reminds me of Respawn's Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order (and its sequel.) Formally, Luna Abyss, a double-A bullet...For most of this week, I was playing Luna Abyss!
Luna Abyss
Where to start?
This game reminds me of Respawn's Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order (and its sequel.) Formally, Luna Abyss, a double-A bullet hell fps, developed by Kwalee Labs, released this year, bears no resemblance to Respawn's pair of third-person metroidvania action games. The similarities lie more in the fact that both games feel like amalgams of other, better games. In Fallen Order, that's Uncharted, and Dark Souls, and Titanfall; in Luna Abyss, the obvious inspirations are Control, Returnal, and DOOM Eternal; to say nothing of the megastructure the game is set in, inspired by the likes of Naissance and BLAME!
Undeniably, both of these works are derivative; they borrow a lot and add only a little that's new. But in Luna Abyss's defense, the result in this case is something that feels starkly different from its inspirations. It's not blindly borrowing ideas even when they don't fit; instead, it's remixing bits of gameplay formulae to create a unique combat experience; it's suspending its derivative visual ideas within stark and striking compositions. Compared to the Jedi games, it might be best to say that it's sampling and interpolating ideas from other games, not remixing them — and the result is a pretty unique experience even if its inspirations are obvious in every frame of every scenario.
The main, notably excellent thing about Luna Abyss is its pacing. The game is an entirely linear shooter, though it adds in some platforming segments to complement a moveset that grows as the game progresses, some gameplay set pieces about possessing giant robots for variety. What's notable about this is that the best parts of the game are often the parts where there is no combat. The artists at Kwalee Labs are masters of composition, and they're able to create extremely striking environments that made me feel tiny, agorophobic, and lost, despite how on-rails the game actually is. I've been writing a piece about the way Alan Wake 2 uses negative space — the space between combat — to build dread, and suspense; the way that game is comfortable with silence, happy to let the player stew. This is a quality Luna Abyss shares: for as frantic as its combat is when it breaks out, the game is very slow and deliberate with its pacing, and gives the player massive amounts of time to soak in its environment and world, to curate a specific emotion, which in its case is less dread, more worry and awe and smallness. But the game also uses negative space in a very literal, artistic sense. The game makes heavy use of blacks, of darkness with tiny areas of light and definition to direct the eye. On my super fancy high color accuracy HDR OLED display with all the fixings, there were often scenes where I literally couldn't see what was around me, not even the gun in my hand, and I was making leaps of faith towards a spot of red in the distance, hoping that it indicated a platform to land on. Even when the player isn't shrouded in darkness, the game constructs its environments and its skyboxes with stark, low-detail blacks and whites, often putting blurring distance fog between the player and the surrounding floor, ceilings and walls, to better frame major set pieces, create a sense of scale, and/or guide the player through the level. The way this game is composed, and the way it guides the player, should genuinely be studied in art schools. It's exceptionally good.
I'm not sure I would call the combat good — I might even be willing to say I dislike it — but it's certainly distinct. It combines DOOM Eternal's lock-and-key style combat design, where specific enemies can only really be damaged by specific guns, with Returnal's bullet hell attack patterns, and a healthy dose of fast, floaty movement to keep things interesting. It includes glory kills which can either heal the player (as DOOM's did) or turn the enemy into a grenade, to explode and damage other enemies, which makes every kill a decision instead of a brief breath of invulnerability. It often stretches its battles out over long platforming segments, forcing the player to balance moving forward with killing enemies before their pressure becomes overwhelming. The result is a very mentally fatiguing system full of constant decision pressure — so to alleviate the stress, the game has an ADS lock-on system so aggressive that it becomes almost physically impossible to miss your shots, meaning you can focus entirely on managing your weapon rotations and avoiding the enemies' attacks.
The system has problems, don't get me wrong; the weapons often feel too similar, and you only really get three of them — the fourth is only for the last couple levels, is super powerful but can only be fired very occasionally due to its tremendous cooldown period, a sort of BFG-9000 that you'll typically use as a fight opener. At certain points it feels like it becomes optimal to play the game like a cover shooter, hiding behind level props or bits of terrain to snipe at enemies, instead of dashing into the action like the game is clearly designed for. But the game is nine hours long, and probably less than half of that is combat, so it certainly doesn't overstay its welcome, and the very unique feel of the combat was more than enough to keep me interested in it. Oh, I should note that I played on the highest, "Scourge" difficulty because I remembered the game's demo being trivially easy — and that remained true for the first couple levels, but the game eventually grew some real teeth, especially in the bossfights, which all took several attempts and all were pretty interesting both visually and mechanically, even if they showed repetitive gameplay design patterns.
The part of a game I care the most about usually is the story, and unfortunately I don't think Luna Abyss's is anything to write home about. Don't get me wrong, it had some elements that I liked: it was cryptic in a way that tickled my brain, without veering into Souls-level impenetrability; it had some neat twists, and some cool, genderfucked characters. But on the other hand, it leaned far too heavily into what felt to me like uninspired Tarot and Norse mythology references, and it had the kind of abrupt ending that usually indicates that the team ran out of budget. A charitable reading of the game could infuse it with a lot of depth. Some interesting points could be made about how the player character Fawkes is only ever a side character, is constantly offered choices that, for them and the player, aren't actually choices at all along a totally linear journey; the game is clearly making a point about power, revolution, and incarceration; its family-drama twist gives the game more emotional weight without undermining the narrative up to that point. But personally, I found the gameplay and exploration experience to be much more compelling than the story, which I would only call "good" in the context of first person shooter stories; which suffers from being too obscure to be affecting, too derivative to be arresting, and, in dialogue, too contemporary to feel mythic or symbolic or weighty.
So Luna Abyss is in some respects a flawed game, but I found it tremendously enjoyable and interesting, and, in terms of its art direction and pacing, genuinely, uniquely excellent. Much like last years Expedition 33, it felt like a really great freshman effort, where while I wasn't over the moon (haha get it because the game is set inside of a moon and Luna is in the title) about every aspect of the final product, I can't wait to see what the studio does next. Oh, hold on, I'm getting a phone call. One second.
Okay, so I've just been informed that the studio that made this game was unceremoniously shuttered and everyone was laid off and they might never get the chance to get another crack at making a game? Oh, ok. I mean, the credits were so short that they had to pad them out by listing the law firms and accountants that the studio contracted, the game had a Game Pass deal, it can't have cost that much to make but — well, I guess that's the state of the gaming landscape in 2026.
What a fucking bummer. Anyway. I encourage you to play Luna Abyss, because it's still excellent. And if you can find a way to get it without sending a dime over to the shit ass publisher so much the better. More than any game I've played, I think Luna Abyss deserves to be a cult classic that people stumble on and are fascinated by for years to come. How can a game be so derivative, and yet also be so compelling, and esoteric, and singular? Well, since the people who made it have all been summarily executed — that's what "laid off" means, right? I assume it's some kind of euphemism — I guess we'll never know, but playing the game and wondering at it provides its own kind of answer.
I also played the Through the Ashes campaign DLC for Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (will this crazy DYKE ever stop talking about Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous?) I held off on playing the DLC for a long time because it's a self-contained campaign with very little relevance to the main game — only using the same systems, is only set in the same city as the game's opening act — but I'm actually disappointed it took me so long to get around to it. "Through the Ashes" is a really interesting piece of design that injects gallons of challenge and interactivity into Wrath's low-level adventuring experience. While Wrath of the Righteous is a power fantasy game, "Through the Ashes," a more im-sim inspired story about a few weak townspeople navigating a treacherous city in the wake of a demon attack, is brutally difficult, and on the higher difficulties, demanded a ton of thought and creativity to get through it. It exerts a ton of resource pressure, makes even getting basic gear a forbiddingly difficult task, and really stretches your system knowledge. "Through the Ashes" also has a neat gimmick where, if you want to be heroic, you can shepherd three to five NPCs through the campaign — but they're all ill, so keeping them alive will put even more pressure on your limited healing/restoration resources. When my journey through the DLC ended with me bringing them all safely to the end, it was delightful and satisfying. I had to really work to get there!
"Through the Ashes" would probably be better in a game with more in-built systems for environmental interactions, like Larian's Baldur's Gate 3. As it is, though the game works hard to offer alternative approaches to combat, the way it does so doesn't ever feel fully natural. Wrath's system was really built around fighting, so giving the player more out-of-combat options mostly just boiled down to putting a contextual prompt in the world here or there. It's certainly a step in the right direction, but it didn't get me thinking creatively about how to use the environment so much as it got me looking around the world for an encounter's auto-win button: a cart on a hill somewhere to push down into the enemies; a spot where I was prompted to throw a rope to climb up a wall and ping kinetic blasts down at cultists who didn't have rope themselves.
"Through the Ashes" was fairly light on narrative content and roleplaying, but the game used a milestone leveling system (where you got XP from completing story quests, instead of by killing monsters) to further disincentive combat, and to encourage you to protect the NPCs and see their stories. This system also works well as a pacing tool — since you level up after finishing a quest, you're often doing so at a moment of rest: after a big battle, or a decision, or an emotional moment, or at the end of an area, instead of the way it works in the main game where levels would often seem to come at a random time: in the middle of a dungeon, for instance, when you don't really want to have do the tedious work of leveling all your characters. Clearly this leveling system was an experiment for Owlcat — like a lot of the stuff in the DLC — and while I didn't notice much of its ideas making its way into their next game Rogue Trader, I think "Through the Ashes" does a good job introducing new gameplay ideas and using them to really stretch the player to their limits. Clearing it did require a frustrating amount of save scumming, though! It's not at all built for a new player.
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Comment on Tildes Minecraft Weekly in ~games
Evie Link ParentI went to the museum this morning so I think I'm gonna hop on for a while to do a map art sometime in the next week, I'll be excited to see what progress you've made!I went to the museum this morning so I think I'm gonna hop on for a while to do a map art sometime in the next week, I'll be excited to see what progress you've made!
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Comment on Looking for feedback and just art criticism of my work in ~creative
Evie LinkHi Faye! Thanks for posting your art here for us! I already gave you my thoughts about Gash when you posted it back during Tildes Make Something Month last year -- what I said generally was that I...Hi Faye! Thanks for posting your art here for us! I already gave you my thoughts about Gash when you posted it back during Tildes Make Something Month last year -- what I said generally was that I liked it very much and would love to see the concept explored more and I'm really happy you feel the same and decided to do more work in the same space.
Bound is a really interesting piece. I think I like it a lot. It pulls up some negative feelings in me. I want to point specifically at the feet photograph because I think it's the better of the two, and that's for a conceptual reason. Obviously neither of these two photos look anything like how you look when you're actually tied up. In the image with the feet, attention is really drawn to this fact by the way that the feet appear to bow away from each other at the ankles -- the point where they're being supposedly tied -- so the yarn feels much more like an imposition, like something the subject of the photo is resisting. It's evocative. By contrast, the photo of the hands just feels like it's doing a little less. And the photos are nearly identical, compositionally, in terms of lighting, in terms of background, so I'm not sure how much is added by displaying both of them.
The stark vibe you're going for really comes through. The flooring? in the background gives me the vibes of, like, your grandmother's basement. And because the subject is shot right against the background with basically no depth of field it feels a little bit claustrophobic -- on the other hand, the thing you're going for where I'm supposed to imagine these two photos as sort of different bodies/parts of the body existing in the same space doesn't come across for me, even after hearing that's the intent. I think that's because of the identical lighting and composition between photos; they read to me more like two drafts of the same photo. There might be more you could do with lighting to situate both the photos within the same space?
That said, I mean, I think the concept is exceptionally strong here, it's a lot more human and visceral than Gash was, and I already thought that one was surprisingly stark and affecting. The use of the chain stitch is a great choice here and I'm impressed by how natural it looks... i.e. it's not easy to make out any kind of warping or tearing as a result of the stitching.
I'm interested by the hypothetical idea of a piece where the subject is in some way aware of and interacting with the yarn. What might that look like? Would that be an interesting direction for you?
I'm honestly super happy to see more of your work, thanks again for sharing!
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Comment on The end of reading is here in ~books
Evie Link ParentMy little sister uses the voice messages too, I think it's a younger Zoomer thing maybe? I asked her about it once and she says it's easier then writing a long message when she just wants to...My little sister uses the voice messages too, I think it's a younger Zoomer thing maybe? I asked her about it once and she says it's easier then writing a long message when she just wants to ramble or work through something emotional which, sure, I guess. I love hearing her voice but it is a bit annoying to have to put in earbuds to continue the conversation. But maybe she finds my multiple-paragraph-long screeds annoying, too.
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Comment on The end of reading is here in ~books
Evie Link ParentSame honestly, though I did come back to re-read the rest. It's not your fault imo. I think it's a fairly weak article that does contains a lot of good points, but also includes these long...Same honestly, though I did come back to re-read the rest. It's not your fault imo. I think it's a fairly weak article that does contains a lot of good points, but also includes these long litanies of context-less statistics and trite, excessively teleological historical analysis, all without any real propulsive narrative to carry you through it. Like, the author ends the essay with her personal history of growing up loving literature, and then slowly losing the habit of reading to her phone. That's good stuff, I feel the sorrow there, I just wish more of the article had been that, instead of boring, affectless cultural commentary stringing together points I've heard before fifty different times.
I also really rolled my eyes when the author attempted to (dismissively) contrast 20th century classic Doctor Zhigavo with alleged modern YA trash Sunrise on the Reaping -- which I haven't read myself, but which my extremely smart (adult) brother loved for being sharp, political, and beautifully written in its own right -- and maybe the author realized this midway through the paragraph, because when she pulls a quote to demonstrate how bad modern lit is, she suddenly pivots to quoting romantasy instead. The article in my opinion needed at least one more pass to refine its arguments, there's a lot of that kind of rhetorical clumsiness there.
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Comment on Of course viewers are giving up on Netflix shows in ~tv
Evie Link ParentHave you read Metal From Heaven, Fae? It's a debut so it has a lot of super rough edges but I really really loved it and I think we have similar tastes just based on this list, it's a bit like TLT...Have you read Metal From Heaven, Fae? It's a debut so it has a lot of super rough edges but I really really loved it and I think we have similar tastes just based on this list, it's a bit like TLT or A Memory Called Empire. Communist swashbuckling lesbian political intrigue, that kind of thing. Really rich prose, a bit miserable but in an ultimately cathartic way.
The Gormenghast novels are also excellent fantasy-adjacent classics that inspired a lot of these books.
I've heard good, vague things about Ancillary Justice but this is the first time I've actually heard the premise, which sounds a bit The Left Hand of Darkness, so I'll probably pick it up next time I see it.
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Comment on Modern, abstract art makes me angry in ~arts
Evie (edited )Link ParentWell, I think we're really getting into the weeds of my internal world and the way through which I look at art -- my specific lens; so don't think that any of what I'm about to say generalizes. My...Well, I think we're really getting into the weeds of my internal world and the way through which I look at art -- my specific lens; so don't think that any of what I'm about to say generalizes.
My approach to art, and art criticism, is always to have my emotional experience with the work, and then, once I've experienced it emotionally, to step closer, and squint, and try to work out what qualities of the work produced that effect. I could write a whole lot more about that. But the point of having human intentionality behind the art doesn't really affect the first part of that process, the "experience" phase. Instead, it's an insurance policy for the second part, a promise that, when I'm analyzing the work, there is something to find, and that the creators of the work genuinely did try to create something that would have some kind of meaning, or produce some kind of effect on the audience. I absolutely have had the experience, by the way, of loving a video game, and then, as I'm analyzing it, realizing that I probably loved it for the "wrong" reasons. That what I got out of it probably wasn't intended. This kind of emergent experience as a result of the interaction between me and a work actually can sour me on the art a little bit but it also reinforces my point about art as a medium for collaboration between creator and audience.
As a postmodernist, I don't really particularly care about the techinques used to make a work of art (asterisk), at least not for the purposes of making a judgment of quality or from separating 'art' from 'non-art.' There are certainly categories of creative processes that tend to produce works that I tend to have little interest in engaging with, little reaction when I do engage with them -- a large, fuzzy category I describe as "machine art." AI, the studio system, you name it. But, to take your clay block example. It makes me think of Pollock and his drip paintings; he would, quite famously, set paint buckets swinging over canvases like pendulums, letting paint drip out from holes in the bottom, to produce some of the most popular and "valuable" works of the 20th century. And on the one hand, I never really liked Pollock's work, none of it that I've seen has particularly resonated with me. So maybe that emergent process of making art tends to produce art that I don't like. But a lot of creative processes are pretty generative and are more focused on a system for creation, a kind of exploratory play than a final, visualized outcome, and I'm not really prepared to dismiss that out of hand. Great Expectations was serialized, published one chapter at a time, and you can tell by how incohesive and episodic it is -- but it's a classic for a reason. And I've gotten a lot out of roleplaying games, which are only systems in and of themselves; to take the Pollock example, a manual for bucket-swinging; to take yours, a guide to clay-block arrangement.
That's all to say that because art deals inherently with human subjectivity, I don't have a hard line on what processes I think are valid or invalid, what will affect me or not. I try to have my experience of the art unencumbered by all of that stuff. Nothing ruins a horror movie like imagining the guy spraying blood on the actors out of a water gun from just out of frame. Human involvement is only important to me in two ways. First: a guarantee that this means something, that there was thought put into it. Second: as a story in its own right -- as a creative myself, I care a whole lot about how people create, how they put their works into the world. And having the context of a work's creation can absolutely, in retrospect, enrich it.
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Comment on Modern, abstract art makes me angry in ~arts
Evie Link ParentBecause the art was made with intentionality, by a person. I trust that they put care into imbuing it with significance and meaning, so I can in turn draw significance and meaning out. That's not...Because the art was made with intentionality, by a person. I trust that they put care into imbuing it with significance and meaning, so I can in turn draw significance and meaning out. That's not to say that I don't get emotional over nature, over a lovely view or whatever. And it's also not to say that I'm sure to pull the same things out of art as were put into it. Interpretation and critique are, themselves, generative and creative processes. But when I look at a work, I know that the person who made it made it for some deliberate human reason, and that changes the way I engage with it.
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Comment on Modern, abstract art makes me angry in ~arts
Evie Link ParentI often forget that looking at art, and pulling meaning out of it, is kind of a learned skill. Especially with abstract art. So that's fair; I do have a bit more experience analyzing this stuff...I often forget that looking at art, and pulling meaning out of it, is kind of a learned skill. Especially with abstract art. So that's fair; I do have a bit more experience analyzing this stuff than most people and things that seem obvious to me might not be to everyone. Not to say that I'm an expert or that my interpretation is in any way objective, of course.
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Comment on Modern, abstract art makes me angry in ~arts
Evie Link ParentYeah, sorry for projecting my younger self onto you a bit there. I mean, this actually gets into my specific criticism with the video right? Because there are a ton of reasons to dislike modern...Yeah, sorry for projecting my younger self onto you a bit there. I mean, this actually gets into my specific criticism with the video right? Because there are a ton of reasons to dislike modern art that have nothing to do with fascist leanings, everything to do with taste, or critique of capital, or even just fetishization of craft and form -- which, yes, fascists do, but so do a lot of others. I think Geller paints the association between disliking art and fascism too strongly; I think a lot of fans of contemporary art, do, too, in a way that feels a bit adolescent to me now (because I did it when I was a bit more adolescent).
And yes OP is criticizing abstract art as a cultural institution and so one good example of it doesn't totally own them but I'm not really trying to convince them to like art that they think is bad. I want people to be open to connection with each other even over things they dislike so, you know, that's why I open myself up talking about abstract art that I like. Not to be convincing, but to be vulnerable, in the hopes that OP or anyone else will start to see the value in reciprocating that.
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
Evie LinkI finished the 2025 indie darling The Roottrees are Dead, in one sitting, and I think I finally have enough evidence to say that I just don't like puzzle or mystery games. Not that I disliked...I finished the 2025 indie darling The Roottrees are Dead, in one sitting, and I think I finally have enough evidence to say that I just don't like puzzle or mystery games.
Not that I disliked Roottrees — quite the opposite, actually; I enjoyed it a fair bit. It reminded me of a mix of The Return of the Obra Dinn (which I played and DNFed years ago) and Dead Letter Department, the horror typing game I wrote up a few months back. Dead Letters is a bad comparison, kind of a Boss Baby situation — it borrows the lightest possible version of the internet research systems from games like Roottrees or Hypnospace Outlaw specifically for the purpose of lulling you into a false sense of security before the horror begins. But that was the comparison that came to mind while playing, because the games conjured similar feelings albeit with very different valences.
Essentially, Roottrees is structured like one big puzzle, where you have to reconstruct a branching family tree of a candy magnate and his many descendants — and maybe even discover the black marks in their history they meant to hide — in the wake of the tragic death of the candy company's fifth President. The game is set in the nineties, so you're doing this on dial-up, searching forums, VHS archives, and old digitized periodicals. And I enjoyed this — like Dead Letters, which was one of my favorites last year, it reminded me of an insurance job I used to do, trying to find missing clients from internet information alone; it reminded me of some of the more obscure research rabbit holes I've fallen down recently, the ones where there's not enough information on a topic to produce an accurate AI overview. Discoveries in Roottrees were often rewarding, and it felt good to doggedly chase a lead until I found that one bit of information, a sentence fragment that let me fill out a missing name or occupation on the tree.
Towards the end, I felt like the game got a little particular about which queries it would accept and give you actionable information for. At that point it the process started to feel less like an internet search and more like a password field that would only unlock clues if you put in the exact right keyword (it wasn't case-sensitive, at least). The immersion kind of breaks at that point, and I had to rely on a couple hints from the game's useful contextual hint system to fill out the last couple names. Ultimately I did get the full 50/50 family tree completed, with all optional spouses and photos to boot, though it required a few short jumps in logic that I'm not quite sure would have been intended.
The game also has one big "final puzzle" about a hidden Roottree excluded from the tree, but I found all the necessary information to solve it trivially easily, in the midgame, so it was a bit of an anticlimax. Still, the ending conversation where that backstory got explained was satisfying, and the game tries to use it to make a point about the importance of collective memory and how we shouldn't let (queer) history be erased.
Then, the game informs you that it has an additional mode called Roottreemania! which I assume is like a new Roottree family tree to reconstruct with new family members and an entirely different history, and I realized that there was nothing I wanted less in the world than to play Roottreemania. I was exhausted; I had a headache like I'd just been pulsed in a mental blender. I started searching Reddit for negative posts about the mode so I could justify not playing itm before I realized, "wait, no one's forcing me to play more of this game." Like I said, I DNFed Obra Dinn, as well as Hypnospace Outlaw; I loved Outer Wilds's ending, but not the puzzles leading up to it; Roottrees took me 5 hours to complete, and while I had a good time, I thought it ran out of steam at the end, and I was nauseated by the prospect of playing it for even a minute longer. I think I just don't have the patience, or the right type of mind, for these deduction-style puzzle games. I'll probably continue to dabble in the genre anytime a new "one of the best games of the year"-tier ones comes out, and I'll probably continue to be unreasonably frustrated by them anytime I get even a little stuck.
I also completed a third playthrough of Pathfinder: Wrath of The Righteous, this time doing an evil playthrough on the Demon path. It was only on this playthrough that I actually grasped one of the game's core themes about evil and intimacy — not least because of the two fantastic female companions, Camelia and Wenduag, who will only join you, or at least let you follow their questlines, if you're sufficiently evil. I mean to write a longer essay on the topic one of these days, discussing Wrath's interesting and nuanced view on the tired good-evil conflict/theme/narrative construct, but suffice it to say that the game takes an interesting position on what evil is, and what makes a person irredemable, that you wouldn't expect from the title and the premise. Shame that it took me three hundred hours to fully catch on; I fully intend to play two hundred hours more, albeit with a long break first.
This was also my first Wrath playthrough where I understood the game well enough to make my own builds! In playthrough one I used the auto-level-up options (which produces some truly bricked characters); playthrough two I used a lot of online build guides; this playthrough, I came up with things myself, only relying on the wiki and in-game systems for information. Pathfinder 1e is a real fucking boondoggle of a system, so I was really proud of myself for coming up with a party of characters that could function on Core difficulty (the one that warns you "this difficulty is only for REAL Pathfinder fans") and even, by the endgame, to complete the final Inevitable Excess DLC on Hard (the second-highest out of a half dozen difficulties, the last one with any semblance of real balance or playability) — this was even better then the build guides I followed for playthrough 2 performed! I can now consider myself somewhat okay at Pathfinder! And, again, it only took three hundred hours.
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Comment on Modern, abstract art makes me angry in ~arts
Evie (edited )Link ParentThanks for pinging me. I don't have anything particularly insightful to add at this point -- everyone's mostly said what I would have said I think, and visual art isn't really my area of...- Exemplary
Thanks for pinging me. I don't have anything particularly insightful to add at this point -- everyone's mostly said what I would have said I think, and visual art isn't really my area of expertise.
I do have some thoughts though.
I've always loved a lot of the postmodern art stuff, in particular abstract impressionism. Two of my favorite paintings of all time are Rothkos; I spent probably hundreds of hours sculpting a facsimile of one of them in Minecraft in an attempt to replicate for the other people on the Tildes server the feeling I got seeing one in a museum in Chicago. But a few years ago I had a therapist who saw the art hanging on my wall in the background, and apropos of nothing, basically made OP's exact point, albeit with a bit less anger, a bit more skepticism and humility.
So like a couple of commenters here did to OP, I implied they were a fascist for thinking that and sent them the Jacob Geller video (ridiculous). I do kind of like that video -- when I first saw it I was all 'heart eyes' over it because Jacob dwells a bit on a specific Rothko painting that I love, the one I built in Minecraft, and he seemed to have a very similar experience with it that I did. I felt very seen. But I think it sort of makes the emotional case that disliking modern art is inherently reactionary, when really, there are lots of good reasons to dislike modern art. Many of them come up in this thread.
I'm more of a theatre critic myself, at least by education, and I first got into Rothko in high school through the stage play RED, which, looking back, is maybe artistic malpractice for the way it depicts Rothko's depression. But what it gets mostly right is in its emphasis of the obsession Rothko had with creating perfect, un-replicable pigments to get the exact right color, texture, value, reflectivity of his colors for the color block paintings he was known for, resulting in enormous canvases with unimaginable depth that can't really be reprinted or experienced through a screen. They're a very strong case for "aura," and against mechanical reproduction. And the play also gets into the way the commodification of his art deeply frustrated him -- as it frustrates all artists.
Having both that appreciation of technique and the emotional investment in Rothko as a person absolutely made me more charitable to his art when I did eventually see it. There's no denying that. But other abstract pieces have also had a huge impact on me without the surrounding context, even when made without apparent skill.
A small example: This (bitwarden link) is one of the paintings I have on my wall, that my therapist reacted so negatively to. When calling them a fascist didn't work, I instead was forced to do what I should have, all along, and explain why I liked it and what it meant to me. It was bought for me by one of my Ladies at a popup event at a comics shop in Texas, I believe, and I haven't been able to find the artist online. I think it's fairly amateur, not the most developed painting; probably, a skilled enough child could make something like it. But I really like the imagery it conjures for me, which is of course facilitated by some neat ideas the piece has.
So there are reoccurring spine and face motifs here, obviously, right? There are a lot of these little spine constructions along the edges of the canvas, with skull-shaped objects attached in some cases; in the upper right corner there's literally just a mask. But there are a lot of elements elsewhere in the painting that seem to trick my pareidolia into seeing faces where there maybe are none (primed by the more identifiable human elements, probably). In the center of the painting, for example, I see a distorted smashed head with bulging eyes and a thick lolling tongue. That plus the highly saturated red everywhere and the muddy purple-brown makes me think that this is a painting of gore, the destruction of the human body, the rendering of it from something obviously human to something unrecognizable and meat. I'm not going to go into why that resonated with me so viscerally (hah) at the time. But now I like the painting for a different reason: because it's vivid, and a little amateurish, and at one point it meant something to me. Even if my interpretation isn't what the artist intended (I've tried to find them online, to tell them how much I love their work, but haven't been able to with only a signature to go off of), that's worth a lot, and now in the painting I see, with fondness, my younger self, how passionate and clumsy she was in her own creative processes, and the ways she looked for meaning.
So, okay, what we're getting at is the reason I love art -- pretty much all art -- which is its power to create or surface emotions, in both the artist and the viewer. That shared experience of emotion then connects creator and viewer, even if they experience the art very differently. I've always disagreed with the notion that art is communication, because it feels like an oversimplification. For me, art is a facilitator, a medium for collaboration; not to be trite, but it's a third space. Experiencing it alone is valuable because it's people-watching, even if you can't take in the conversations the artists are having, or what the fuck they're talking about. Experiencing it with others is valuable, because now we get to talk about art, how it affected us. And like with the "Gore in Red and Blue" on my wall, our relationship with works can evolve over time, creating or responding to new ideas and sentiments. You lose that when you treat a work as a static object, as a mere reproduction or representation of reality, as a simple statement.
A while back, my lady and I saw this neat sculpture at an Ai Weiwei exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum. A lot of the photography work, the exploration of Chinese cultural objects there, meant a whole lot more to her than it did to me; meanwhile I was a lot more fascinated by some of the more abstract, noncontingent sculpture stuff. But we both really loved the bike sculpture, and it was really fun to just walk around it and feel the way it directed us, the abortive sense of motion it created. And then to talk about it after (this is also why I like going to museums on second or third dates, by the way -- loser behavior, I know.)
Anyway. I'd hate to have any of those avenues closed off to me because I let my experience with art, even art I dislike, to be wholly dictated by a disgust reaction. That's my point. I think it's important to empathize with art, to be charitable to artists (who are almost always in the trenches, man!) just like you would with the people around you. We pour so much of our selves into our work, after all. It's rare for art to be truly cynical or soulless -- except for machine art, but that's another essay.
(edit: expanded on some points a little to make them connect better)
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Comment on I tried Erewhon’s new $15,000-a-year VIP membership for a month in ~food
Evie Link ParentI would struggle to spend that much on groceries, I think. Our food budget works out to about 10k per year, in one of the most expensive cities in the world, shopping for three, often at the nice...I would struggle to spend that much on groceries, I think. Our food budget works out to about 10k per year, in one of the most expensive cities in the world, shopping for three, often at the nice grocery stores. That's a lot of smoothies to close the gap! Ironically it would make more sense to me if Erewhon prices were as absurd as they're often portrayed.
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Comment on What are your gaming idiosyncracies? in ~games
Evie Link ParentSo real... Few things are more entertaining to me than online microdrama about balance patches in live service games I'll never play. Even if there's no drama involved it's still fun to read...So real... Few things are more entertaining to me than online microdrama about balance patches in live service games I'll never play. Even if there's no drama involved it's still fun to read through good update notes where the devs go the extra mile to explain all the changes
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
Evie LinkThis week I played last year's narrative RPG Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector. I wrote up the original Citizen Sleeper last year in November and though I was quite positive on that game it took...This week I played last year's narrative RPG Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector. I wrote up the original Citizen Sleeper last year in November and though I was quite positive on that game it took me a bit to get around to its sequel. Ultimately I'm glad I did — in many respects, Starward Vector represents a significant imrpovement on and evolution of its predecessor.
I'll try to keep things mostly spoiler-free below.
Citizen Sleeper: Starward Vector
In the family of the CRPG, a game genre that, in the nineties, aimed to emulate the old school tabletop roleplaying games for computers, two distinct branches have developed in recent years. An oversimplification: CRPGs can either be narrative games or adventure games. The former, a subgenre largely stemming from Planescape: Torment and Disco Elysium, features games that eschew combat in order to focus on a fairly linear story, while developed political and philosophical themes. Meanwhile the latter — a subgenre with a much more filled-out history, spanning from 1998's Baldur's Gate to 2023's Baldur's Gate 3 (and many, many more besides) often focuses on traditional adventure stories, where the focus is more on exploring, fighting, and expressing power over the world through the decisions you make to shape the story and your character. I've been really only playing CRPGs lately and when you do you really notice just how fundamentally different these two subgenres are, how different a narrative game like Esoteric Ebb is from an adventure game like Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. Principally, the narrative games are often extremely light on gameplay, and can even feel a bit like a chore; can even evoke feelings of "I wish this were a novel," as I often felt while, say, playing Disco Elysium and changing my clothes in the middle of a tense scene to get a better chance of passing a skill check.
The heavily Disco-inspired game Citizen Sleeper fit solidly into the "narrative" camp. That game was an episodic story set on a space station, with every episode sort of running in parallel, where you, an escaped robot slave, found a new community for yourself. But as its sequel, Starward Vector, evolves the formula, it becomes on the one hand considerably more linear, less choice-y — but also more gameplay-driven, more focused on telling its story through its systems like the adventure CRPGs do.
In both Citizen Sleeper games, the story progresses in "cycles." At the start of each cycle, or day, you roll a pool of five six-sided dice, and you have to find things to use those dice on throughout the day. You roll a six? You might want to use it to progress an important main story quest. Roll a two or a one? Spend it on something less important, like a gig, because your chance of failure will be higher. This "dice pool" system was honestly not very well implemented in the first game. The reason for this was that there was a whole separate game system, the hacking system, that used low dice rolls like keys in locks, so when you got "unlucky" and rolled all ones and twos for a day, you would just progress the hacking segments, whereas when you got lucky, and rolled high numbers, you would just do regular tasks. This effectively meant that you were never choosing where to spend dice: what tasks you must succeed on, what tasks were okay to risk failing. Starward Vector largely does away with this system, and in general, dials up the difficulty and pressure significantly.
Last year, I described Citizen Sleeper as a game about gig work, where every day you would work four or five different shifts for four or five different employers: whoever had work for you that day. Starward Vector by contrast is more a game about contract work; in it, you'll start jobs that take three to five days, and with your crew, fly out to those jobs and work with single-minded intensity on them till they're done. The pressure on these jobs is high: numerous game systems like stress and dice damage are designed to make failures cascade into more failures, so low rolls can be devastating, but tight timers mean that often you'll have to risk a bad result to get the job done in time. The general feeling with a lot of these jobs is that when you succeed, you succeed by the skin of your teeth, and when you fail — as I did in three jobs throughout the game — it was always due to a mistake on your part. When you fail a plot-critical job, the game will always ensure you have a way to fail forwards and progress the narrative anyway, but he mechanical effects of the failure — broken dice removed from your pool, high resource costs, or even a permanent glitch on death — will stick with you for a long time.
In addition to adding, in essence, difficulty and gameplay and time pressure, Starward Vector evolves on its predecessor in terms of how it structures its narrative. Citizen Sleeper the First takes place on one space station: the Eye — where a slate of largely disconnected episodes unfold in parallel. It largely lacks a main plot; though there is some connective tissue, my experience with the game was that it was more about exploring the Eye, and the people who live there. By making repeated decisions to stay on the Eye at the end of every questline, by how expansive and lived-in it becomes, the place begins to feel like a home for your character, which is, I would argue, the game's emotional core. Starward Vector takes place instead across a large asteroid belt on maybe a dozen different outposts, which you fly between in your ship the Rig, and of course none of these places are as well-developed as the Eye. Though the narrative remains episodic, it's a bit more linear and directed, with more connective tissue and a mostly set order in which you'll visit each station (though you can explore and do sidequests). Structurally, this allows for a better paced experience, with stronger core themes. But it also means that there's less of a feeling of agency in the narrative, and it's much harder to get invested in the world or the characters.
A lot of Citizen Sleeper 2's characters are carry-overs from the first game, albeit with slight redesigns, a few years on. Unfortunately, I recognized almost none of the characters — apart from the three refugee captains from the first game's ending DLC, who were all better fleshed out there than any of the base game's characters. Despite strong designs and visual identities, this general lack of recognizability speaks to the fact that Citizen Sleeper's characters were not particularly memorable, but I fear this is going to be even more true for its sequel. So many of these characters are just unbelievably flimsy, with their entire screen presence amounting to three five minute scenes in a ten hour game — barely enough to amount to an arc, in most cases; often, if they do change, it feels abrupt, clumsy, and forced.
This is a direct consequence of Citizen Sleeper's writing style, I think. It's tight and punchy, very plot-focused and fairly fast paced. On its own this isn't a flaw but it doesn't leave a lot of room for moments to sit with the characters, hear what they have to say, and watch them evolve. Starward Vector's intended fix for this problem is that the incidental dialogue characters have on jobs will help flesh them out, but that dialogue, too, feels wasted, because what characters I take to a job is determined not by what characters I want to hear from, but what skills I literally need to be able to succeed, and what they say is mostly static and work-oriented anyway. That plus a lack of strong character-specific dialogue voices means that characters are usually made up of no more than a gimmick, a strong portrait, and a clumsy arc, and the only characters that get well developed are the sleeper you inhabit, and, to a lesser extent, your friend Serafin who, unlike the other companion characters is always with you on almost every job and story mission, and has full episodes dedicated to fleshing him out.
An episode usually consists of entering a new station, maybe one where a timer is ticking to apply some pressure. You'll spend a couple cycles exploring the station by spending dice, meet some characters, and eventually, do one or two jobs for them, during which the plot will unfold. At the end of the episode, you might be given a bit of technology you need, or a lead on how to deal with the game's antagonsist, Laine. These episodes have a very nice flow both internally and from one to the next; the game is more-ish and hard to put down, just like Citizen Sleeper. But unlike its predecessor, Starward Vector's gameplay variety: alternating between relaxed station exploration and dialogue, and tense, skin-of-your-teeth jobs, contributes a strong feeling of pressure, momentum and variety that was sorely needed. Experienetally, it reminds me of one of the CRPGs I've been writing about these past few months, the adventure CRPG Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Kingmaker has similar ticking clocks, similar resource management loops, and a similar two-way split between its relaxed kingdom management segments and it tense, more story and combat-driven episodes as you fight to stabilize your kingdom in the Stolen Lands. Of course, Kingmaker is longer, more esoteric, and less polished, but the similarities here are not just structural, but thematic. Both games, fundamentally, are about bodily autonomy and sexual violence.
In Starward Vector, much like in the first game, you play as an escaped robot slave. In this one, though, you're not escaping a corporation. You're escaping a man, Laine, who lured you into working with him with promises of helping free you from your corporate masters, before, eventually, severely traumatizing you, taking control of your body, and severely damaging your memory. Waking up in tatters at the start of the game, you escape Laine's space station and spend the game trying to put yourself back together and heal. Throughout that experience, you meet characters who see you explicitly as an object, or who refer to you as a slave, as an 'it'; you meet other sleepers who have had similar experiences, and humans who don't understand, but will try to support you anyway. I can't talk about the ultimate message of this game without spoiling the ending — and I won't, because the game is very much worth playing — but by the end I was in tears, feeling a bit hopeless and a bit mixed up inside.
I think a good, spoiler-free way to put it is that Citizen Sleeper and Kingmaker explore similar themes from opposite directions. In Kingmaker, you make your burgeoning kingdom a home for outcasts, victims, and survivors, and support them as they fight their battles against the past; the game is about gaining stability, about healing, about proving to the world and your companions that you are a worthy leader — even, if you choose to — unto the point of redeeming that game's main villain, herself a victim of gendered violence and a millenia-long curse. But in Starward Vector, you play as the victim yourself, and the game isn't about gaining stability or healing; it's about coming to terms with your brokenness, with what you can hold onto and what, despite your best efforts, you can't. This story feels less exploratory, more specific; the type of painful, hard-to-swallow thing that a narrative RPG can do, and a rollicking adventure about growing a kingdom can't. But Starward Vector also surpasses it narrative CRPG peers, by using its mechanics, its dice, to reinforce that story about damage and brokenness and the long-lingering impacts of trauma. Even with its weak characters and occasionally clumsy writing, in its subgenre, it's my favourite experience since Disco Elysium, and an easy game to recommend.
I also played Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous a second time, and have started a third playthrough, even. The game is so reactive, it's very very hard to put down. Every time I make a major choice, I think, "I can't wait to do another playthrough to see what it would look like if I chose X instead."
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Comment on Signet City | Reveal trailer in ~games
Evie LinkOh wow, perfect timing, I just finished playing Citizen Sleeper 2 the other day (and I loved it, even more than the first game). Looks like an interesting premise. Making left-wing art about...Oh wow, perfect timing, I just finished playing Citizen Sleeper 2 the other day (and I loved it, even more than the first game). Looks like an interesting premise. Making left-wing art about mushrooms seems to be very fashionable at the moment for some reason
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Comment on Control Resonant | Story/release date reveal trailer – 24th September 2026 in ~games
Evie LinkI feel like this date is probably gonna have to move if Remedy don't want to get stomped on by Silent Hill Townfall and to a lesser extent Wolverine -- hell back in 2023 they moved Alan Wake 2...I feel like this date is probably gonna have to move if Remedy don't want to get stomped on by Silent Hill Townfall and to a lesser extent Wolverine -- hell back in 2023 they moved Alan Wake 2 back a week to avoid splash damage from Spider Man 2 so maybe Insomniac is perpetually haunting Remedy.
Anyway corpo talk aside I'm so unbelievably excited for this game. I feel like this trailer is alright but the "Paranatural Manhattan" trailer they showed at SGF was just gorgeous, this hugely confident flex of the game's art direction, with great music to boot
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Comment on What are people's experiences with using Kagi? in ~tech
Evie Link ParentKagi has more features for sure but in the six months I was using it I found I just didn't get enough use out of them to justify the subscription over DDG.Kagi has more features for sure but in the six months I was using it I found I just didn't get enough use out of them to justify the subscription over DDG.
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Comment on The 100 best novels of all time published in English in ~books
Evie (edited )LinkI never know how to feel about these lists. You know I think the methodology here is decent but it also leads to an obvious skew away from genre or really anything niche(I mean, the Left Hand of...I never know how to feel about these lists. You know I think the methodology here is decent but it also leads to an obvious skew away from genre or really anything niche(I mean, the Left Hand of Darkness was seminal, but is that really the ONLY sci-fi representation here? Unless I missed something), towards the classics, and sometimes towards very high placements of books that I would personally characterize as more "impressive" than "good" (Ulysses, The Man Without Qualities). Speaking of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, I always find it slightly stupid to put works in translation on lists like these. It says English in the title, right? Why is the Quixote there? Why Pedro Páramo and One Hundred Years of Solitude and Invisible Cities -- brilliant books no doubt, that are among my personal favorites, but are also works in translation where, somewhat notoriously, their ambiguity and poeticisms often fail to come across in English?
I guess lists like these are best as jumping off points for discussion, but I tend to prefer more personal lists anyway because by attempting to be definitive these come out kinda anonymous.
Anyway I do agree with a lot of these picks in full: Catch 22, Wuthering Heights, the Nabokov stuff (if I'm right in remembering that Nabokov wrote in English and then his family translated it into Russian). All holds up marvelously. I do wonder what more recent novels will be making lists like this in fifty years when they're "eligible." Chain Gang All Stars, maybe. House of Leaves? I mostly read dyke-y genre stuff these days so I'm not hugely tapped in.
Oh yeah this happened to me for a while. I think it's fairly common, when you're depressed, to want it to get worse. If I had to try to access that mindset now -- it's foreign to me, with so much distance -- I'd say that happiness feels impossible, so inconceivable that you can't even imagine how you would begin to pursue it, and every suggestion towards that end becomes trite. But depression -- misery, malaise, an awful adhesion between the back and the bedsheets, every morning -- it's not a place you can imagine living. It's too dull, too purgatorial. To get worse is to have a direction, the only one you can imagine. Towards suicide, I guess, or some other kind of self annihilation. And it's not all bad, going downhill. There's all kinds of tiny thrills: the thrill of pity, from those around you; the thrill of novel thinking, as you invent new arguments to justify the unjustifiable. The thrill of wind in your hair, chills and goosebumps. From other depressed people, I've heard similar sentiments. It's even a line from the suicidal alcoholic protagonist in Disco Elysium: "I don't want to get better, I want to get worse."