A great, impending doom is coming – when the season ends, The Yawhg will come, bringing untold death and destruction. The players each choose a character and, by choosing where to spend their time when, they tell a story of the last season before the great change comes. Each turn involves reading a short story prompt, making a choice, and then seeing the consequences. After everyone’s taken enough turns, the game ends, and you see how your characters lived.
This story is told with a sense of humor. There are vampires, drinking contests, streetwise burglars and vigilantes, potions gone wrong. While there is occasionally peril, your character is not going to die before The Yawhg arrives. The game luxuriates in strange, non sequitur experiences, like meeting an old man who asks you to stand against the sun and provide him some shade for a nap. Moments like these keep the game light and award all kinds of play. Tell your story – and tell it again differently next time.
The Yawhg released into a climate experiencing an independent multiplayer boom scattered across tabletop RPGs, board games, and video games, and it combines elements of all three. The branching narratives of The Yawhg invoke the Twine interactive fiction boom and matches games like Johann Sebastian Joust or Spaceteam. Its beautifully drawn art by Emily Carroll and its short playtime (a four person game of The Yawhg takes about 30-45 minutes) remind me of games like Tokaido and Agricola.
But the game The Yawhg reminds me most of is the tabletop RPG The Quiet Year, a map-drawing game where players take turns in a fantastic settlement drawing random events from a deck and, ultimately, facing down impending doom, the arrival of The Frost Giants at the end of the year. The two games are similar in their concept of offering more life in the settlement than just preparation for the End of Days. The taking of turns, drawing of cards as random events, and building of a collaborative story are kismet – the two games released at roughly the same time and appealed to many of the same people.
But what differentiates The Yawhg and The Quiet Year, apart from The Yawhg automating the process and taking about a quarter of the play time, is that The Yawhg centers on its characters whereas The Quiet Year is built around the community. The Quiet Year actually makes specific rules around not picking particular characters for each player – while you’re allowed to return to pet themes and storylines, The Quiet Year positions the players as responsible for both introducing the characters and creating the friction in their lives. The Yawhg uses its perspective within the characters’ shoes to automate that narrative friction and let the players imagine personalities without feeling responsible for eventually tearing them down.
The two games make beautiful companions for one another. Between them, I see a powerful understanding of the possibilities in the medium. Understanding the two next to one another creates dialogue about intention in design and tone management. I understand this reason for loving these games sounds so niche and dorky. I really appreciate having two variations on this idea, one aimed at the highest level of RPG players ready to create a story world together and take seriously its politics, economy, and characters, and one aimed at all levels of roleplay designed to laugh, look at some beautiful art, and relish in someone else’s great work.
THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: TEARS OF THE KINGDOM Nintendo 2023 Nintendo Switch
Tears of the Kingdom’s greatest strengths are in its use of mystery to drive plot, in lost time to create pathos, and its incredible mechanical depth to enhance the gameplay of Breath of the Wild. I found the eventual storyline regarding Princess Zelda to be quite moving, and the dungeons at the centerpiece of this game’s five major temples are clever and concisely designed. Songs like “Lookout Landing,”“Water Temple,” and the new “Main Theme” prove Manaka Kataoka (who got her start writing the iconic “7 P.M.” theme from Animal Crossing: New Leaf will be one of the greatest composers in gaming history. Rather than share the same sort of post I typically do regarding Tears of the Kingdom, an enormous and gorgeous game which could merit an entire playthrough diary and a book’s worth of criticism, I’ve decided to share the diary I wrote during my first days with the game.
5/14/2023
I’ve decided to start keeping a diary of my sessions playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. There are a number of root causes, but the primary is pretty simple – I want to track my own understanding of the game’s world and lore, exploring the narrative empty space the game offers. It wouldn’t be the first time that I started expanding on a narrative throughline and had it collapse by game’s end. Skyward Sword’s Groose, in a heroic sacrifice, seals Demise within himself and becomes the Demon King Ganondorf, destined to battle his friend Link generationally and lose every time, maybe intentionally. Or…not. But that empty space I filled in still feels thematically relevant and possible, informing how I think about the game’s text. Maybe that misdirection was always in place.
Tears is full of empty space, literally and figuratively, for the player to try to piece together a mystery. A being what look like Zelda keeps being spotted throughout Hyrule, only she doesn’t really behave like Zelda and seems capable of some kind of teleportation or projection. My theory, right now, is that this is The First Zelda, Queen of Hyrule, the Sage of Time (so named by the Sage of Wind) who has projected forward to aid (or threaten) Hyrule’s people. Documented so far, I’ve spotted her:
-Silently blessing Link’s arm with Recall, in the body of a Golden Tear. -Receiving the Master Sword from Link, presumably back in the past. -Standing on Hyrule Castle’s ruins before floating away in golden light. -The Blood Moon rises, with new, more confident, slightly fear-inspiring dialogue. -*REPORTED*: Zelda came to Kakariko Village after the Upheaval dropped the Ring Ruins. After inspection, she told Purah and her team to stay away from one particular floating ruin. (I can’t airdrop onto it – maybe an angle where pictures can help?) -Spotted in Rito Village, though no mention of her doing anything but floating away. -Spotted on Stormbringer Ark, just walked forward and disappeared (no floating.) -Seen in Memory of the Sage of Wind, where she’s called “The Sage of Time” and in which she predicted Link’s quest.
Zelda in front of the Blood Moon.
Any of these appearances could hypothetically be “Our Zelda” (would like to come up with a name for her. The Archeologist?) or The Sage of Time, or even any Zelda in between those two. So far, none of the Zeldas I’ve seen since separating in the Tomb Depths acts like our Zelda. She’s more direct, mostly, with the rest being on the marginalia. Our Zelda is prone to tangents, repetition – she’s a little nerd and we like that for her. She’s also much more timid. I believe these are appearances by The Sage of Time, and Our Zelda is still somewhere else.
The Stormbringer Ark legend is a curious one. Why did the Rito return to Hyrule? Did they first reach the Stormbringer during The Demon King’s first invasion? The memory of the Sage of Wind indicates so. No other reference to an upheaval is mentioned during the Sky Temple. Did the Rito people simply not participate in the Imprisoning War? Was the Stormbringer (armed with cannons) used as the lead battleship in an aerial fleet? Many questions still to answer. Winter has thawed with Colgera defeated. I’m a little melancholy to have fully reset the region so quickly, but I don’t actually love snow areas in these games, so I’m more likely to dig deeper.
Other threads to pull on in the next sessions:
-Kakariko Village’s Ring Ruins. Still don’t know what these are. One story about the six sages found so far. Might have to make a priority here. -Hateno Village’s Mayoral Election. The fashion lady is obnoxious. I’m helping Reese. I do really like the hat she designed, though. -Lurelin Village’s pirate invaders. They’ve taken over my favorite town in the whole game. I’ll have them longshanks. I wonder if you’ll have to go around and find all the citizens who’ve left, or if word will travel for you. -How long has it been since BOTW? Seemingly, at least a few years. Zelda built a school in Hateno and took over Link’s house. Tulin has come of age, from childhood to becoming a warrior. Paya is now a young adult. -Impa’s pilgrimage. She left with someone and put Paya in charge to search for something. I wonder if we’ll find her out there. -The Chasms and Sky Archipelagos. If there is some broader narrative to explore above or below, I haven’t found it yet. No quests are really sending me up or down to explore yet. I know the Yiga Clan is in the depths somewhere, though. I need to hunt for some sky quests. Maybe then I’ll be able to upgrade my power supply. -The Lucky Clover Gazette. Stable questline. Maybe the first thing I’ll do is warp around to different stables and progress those questlines ASAP. Give myself some more direction. -Lookout Village. Haven’t really dug deeper into the castle or what’s going on in the village. Supposedly, after the first Temple is completed, stuff opens up in Lookout. I’ll have to stop back. -Bubblefrog Caves. No idea who to trade the snowflakes to. Satori gave me a clue to look for caves. I wonder if that’s still online, or if it’s been long enough that I’d need to return to the mountain to extend the blessing. -Din’s dragon. I’ve seen Farrosh and Lanayru. No sign of the red dragon yet. I haven’t been north of the castle except for the Rito questline.
I’ve visited three of the major towns and activated their warps. That leaves five more, right? -Tarrey Town -Gerudo Town -Death Mountain Town -Zora’s Domain -Lurelin Village
Lurelin is next. After that, I’ll have to start poking around. I did see that Hestu is apparently northeast of Lookout Village, so I’ll head that way in the hopes of expanding my inventory.
Hestu in Tears of the Kingdom.
5/15
Okay, I made very little lateral progress (just getting east of Lookout slightly) but I made a ton of progress on many of these questions. It’s crazy how much of this game is just laying about in open fields to surprise.
-Bubblefrog Caves. I’m headed for Woodland Stable to meet the “old couple” there who collect Bubblefrog medals.
-Lookout – Things didn’t open up *that* much after the temple. Hestu’s arrived, thankfully. The hidden passage under the castle has a Demon Statue and a little loot down there, but until I can break black blocks, I’m not getting any deeper. (Diamond weapons? Eldin power of summoning?) I’ve unlocked the next phase of Josha’s Chasm questing, to find an underground temple and get a power there (Auto-Build?)
-Impa’s pilgrimage. Sure enough, she was right on the path from Lookout to Rito, investigating the Geoglyphs. This was probably the most impactful bit of lore I got all session – the Geoglyphs each carry one of the Dragon’s Tears, which unlock a memory of Our Zelda’s experience on the other side of her time jump. She definitely is operating in the past! And it seems I was wrong about The First Zelda. If the Sage of Time is not Our Zelda, then she’s also not the First Queen of Hyrule. The First Queen of Hyrule, Rauru’s wife, is a Hylian named Sonia. Each Geoglyph has a memory (found in a small water pool on the design). The next phase of Impa’s quest, where I can presumably find the locations of all the designs and add them to my map, is in a cave in the Hebra trench.
-Lurelin Village’s pirate invaders. Zonai Monster Control have been sent to contest the pirates. I’m headed that way next *for sure* after the Woodland Stable (lol).
-Ancient Hylian text crashed down into the Lookout, sending Wortsworth the Lore Expert to Kakariko Village. Maybe this will allow the questline to progress?
-A construct merchant crashed just north of Lookout, offering a trade of 100 crystallized ore (or whatever currency) for 1 energy cell. Thankful I’ve got that all sorted now!
-Found some brightcap hunters and shield surfers all headed toward the Hebra region. And a cave with a “white bird’s treasure” north in Hebra. If I need to make some cash and find new weapons, I should probably explore northern Hebra.
-Hit 8 hearts, so I’m headed for my first stamina ring. Will switch back to hearts till at least 16 i think after that?
-The Lucky Clover Gazette questline seems to have pointed me toward a vision of Zelda riding some great beast. The images look unfamiliar – maybe this game’s interpretation of Dodongo, but otherwise not recognizable to me. (Dodongo are one of the Zelda 1 enemies still not interpreted in this game, so they’d make sense! There are too many not included to list, though, and they certainly won’t add all of them.)
Main quest stuff: I’m surprised, but returning to Lookout has definitely pointed me toward Eldin next. They’re battling a Gloom crisis on Death Mountain, turning Gorons hostile, but the land is temperate and the need for fire-resistant armor is temporarily eliminated. I’m sure once I clear the Gloom it’ll be back in full swing, though…maybe will buy the armor before I complete that questline.
Lurelin calls, though.
Impa’s blimp overlooking the Geoglyph.
5/16
Lurelin draws even nearer! I’m overlooking the swamp now, with an awful Thunder Gleeok visible overlooking the path into Lurelin. I found a pirate ship on the coast as well, so I know I’m getting close. (Unfortunately, given every enemy appears to be a black or blue foe, I may be here waaaaay too early.) Some headway on other questlines as well.
-The “odd couple” collecting bubbulfrog medals is Kilton and his brother. I never really interacted with Kilton in BOTW, and it feels like he’s got a different vibe.
-We are close enough in time to the Upheaval that a sidequest where borrowing farming tools from a stable is close enough to be a misunderstanding. Maybe a few months.
-Found my first Gloom monsters east of the castle. That was…terrifying oh my god!!!! They can take a lot of damage!
-The Yiga Clan have set up shop on the Great Plateau. I got a Yiga mask after setting free a designer. They also outlined on a map three other locales – they’ve kept their primary base in the desert, but also set up north of the castle in Hebra and even further east of Death Mountain in Akkala.
-The Great Plateau also had by far the most powerful shield I’ve found so far.
-I’ve found the musicians and the first Great Fairy! The others are marked on the map, and they’ll require musicians of their own. You can meet the musicians outside of the band’s tour, you just have to figure out where they went. The drummer is somewhere north of Kakariko, the flutist is at the Horse God’s old stomping ground stable.
-Speaking of the Horse God, a nap revealed that it can be found at a stable in Akkala. People looking for the Horse God think they can find the White Stallion.
-The journalism questline so far has been fairly relaxed, but hasn’t helped me find much of anything about Zelda. The Great Fairy seems to think the blonde figure who looks like Zelda isn’t her.
I also found another couple memories. The first was mostly just showing Rauru’s sage power – big fire of lasers, but also saw Ganondorf’s Gerudo forces (and his summoning of the molduga.) The second was more important – it depicts Sonia’s grave (the mural in the intro also depicts Ganon taking the Secret Stone from Sonia, presumably killing her) and Zelda confronting Rauru about their demise. He mentions “his hubris” leading them to that point. His hubris…maybe Ganon came looking to make a pact? Or maybe just peaceful conquering.
Almost to my goal. Almost rescued my friend from pirates.
The south Thunder Gleeok.
5/17/2023
LURELIN IS SAVED!
That’s really the only major event in this session that I saved. Bolson is there and is going to help rebuild the time – 15 logs and 20 hylian rice. That was one long fucking fight.
I also did fight my way through the black bricks in the Hyrule Castle-bunker passage. It was a fun run! It leads basically into the bottom of the castle, what’s left after you shoop half the castle into the sky. I did one more major event. I leapt under the chasm under Hyrule Castle…and, yeah, unsurprisingly, that leads into the endgame. It’s a long series of tunnels, full of black horriblins, shock like likes, shock keese, ice varietals of both of those, and a white lynel. All of the above are covered in gloom. And then you eventually make it back to the tomb from the beginning. The mural – it reveals that using the monster sword, they can summon a great dragon to battle Ganon back. Past that, you jump down into the heart of the gloom, where a cutscene plays and you fight a full horde of Ganon’s army alongside any sages you’ve gotten secret stones. Since the spoilers abound (I already know too much about the dragon being summoned, for example) I figured I’d find this out sooner rather than later anyway, and thankfully now I know how difficult it is to accidentally stumble into the endgame. (How many people accidentally found themselves battling Calamity Ganon in BOTW? This is way more obvious and requires way more intentional travel. Though…maybe there’s a shortcut I haven’t found.)
THE ONLY SON Dir. Yasujiro Ozu 1936 Criterion Channel
This piece originally ran on September 23, 2019 in The Solute. Please follow the link at the end of this preview for the full piece – there is no paywall.
“Life’s tragedy begins with the bond between parent and child.”
The Only Son, Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu’s first talkie (and 35th film) u, opens with this brief, unattributed axiom. A brief prologue introduces us to Ozu’s famous style and tone— shooting subjects head-on, looking directly into the camera to confront the viewer with their emotional culpability. But we also see a parochial pre-war Japan where a mother (Choko Iida) cannot afford to send her son to middle school. A visit from the elementary school teacher reveals both the son’s lie about his future and the impossible but important task of adapting to a world that will change Japan very, very soon.
So begins a tale of a simple drama — a mother gives her last remaining days of youth to support her son, and after graduating college, he doesn’t respect her enough to tell her when he gets married or when he has a child. His justification is that he hasn’t become successful enough as a businessman — he is living in shame, but his mother is far less hurt by his fiscal “lack of success” and more by the man he has become.
This is one of those rare movies where I get mad because the people who like it don’t like it enough for me. Gemini Man isn’t just “a well directed movie with a bad script.” Gemini Man fucking rocks. Gemini Man, directed by Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain’s Ang Lee, is a combination of the high-octane masterpiece action he’s still maybe most acclaimed for with the sensitive humanist sentimentality of his adaptation of Sense & Sensibility or his masterpiece Eat Drink Man Woman.
Under another director, I don’t doubt the dialogue in this film would clang left and right. There is a lot of exposition required to tell the story of Henry Brogan, ex-US government assassin and now fugitive being hunted by his own youthful clone. The most obvious comparison for this movie is to Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid, a saga about genome soldiers, crossed allegiances personal and political, and full of the same ridiculous over-the-top bullet time action you see in Gemini Man.
This film excises Metal Gear’s famous extended political diatribes (for those who don’t play games, these basically play out like Donald Sutherland’s extended monologue in JFK, complete with archival footage) and places any monologue in the mouth of either Will Smith or Will Smith, the sole exceptions belonging to Clive Owen’s villainous Clay Verris. The Verris scenes largely play out like a more standard villain from a 90s film, though there are some pleasantly disarming moments where he can’t help but actually show some affection for his favorite experiment. It’s an interesting choice, the sort other directors would probably excise so he were easier to hate. Ang Lee understands that his villains are best when they have their weaknesses.
Jr. and the villainous Clay Verris.
The dual Smith performances are honestly pretty remarkable. Younger Will as Junior put some effort into playing him closer to Bel-Air; a famous anecdote claims Ang Lee told Smith he needed to “be a little more wooden, act worse” because the maturity of his portrayal was spoiling the effect. Older Will as Henry plays the disaffected glaze of an easygoing snark in a way always betraying the pain underneath. He doesn’t play it like a violent sociopath, either – it’s represented more personally, as someone who recognizes that their life choices led them to create a bubble of alienation and excess that never really provided room for intimacy or growth. The mask falls during a confrontation with Junior, and Smith plays the growing crescendo of doubt swallowing him whole.
That scene in particular is so fascinating to me as a representation of the way therapists talk about the therapeutic dialectic. The older Smith looks at his younger self and addresses every insecurity, every trauma, every happy memory and every impulse with the neutrality of an outside observer, and both performances are forced to reckon with how it feels to both witness and be witnessed at the same time. These are simultaneously the things that make them the same and yet the expression of them inherently divides them across a mass gulf in power and experiences. How do you talk to yourself? How does the inner voice that tells you these things treat you, and how do you respond as both audience and presenter?
Poolside meeting, waiting for a Russian bioengineer.
There are other ways to dig into the ways this film says things about concentrations of power, abusive dynamics, denial, transactional relationships. Admittedly, they largely aren’t that deep – what they do is provide a structure to what is just whip-ass action. In their first big fight scene, one Will Smith throws a grenade and the other shoots it out of the air back at him. Later, one of them roundhouse kicks the other with a motorcycle. There’s a lot of really wonderful wirework in this film, and transposing it into the modern era results in a lot of Mom’s Dead Parkour. Lee’s direction of action is just so much better than so many of his contemporaries, and I’m surprised by the dismissal of this film on those grounds alone.
I unfortunately never got to see the film in True Ang-O-Vision, 120fps 3D 4K, but in 60fps it’s still pretty breathtaking stuff. The effect of the high frame rate and 4K capture has me looking at every action scene and going “how the fuck did they do that?” It serves the more dramatic conversations well, too, as Smith is so good at playing the growing microexpressions through a scene, and it obscures some of the uncanny of the de-aging. If you don’t have access to the 4K Blu-Ray for that 60fps presentation, we’ll have to watch it sometime.
Weezer’s self-titled debut turned 30 on May 10th, 2024, the day I am writing this first draft. This album is the mainstream companion to the nerdcore rising of Weird Al Yankovic, They Might Be Giants, and Barenaked Ladies. Enough of the songs have plausible deniability that you can play one or two of them without devolving into a conversation about Monty Python, Mel Brooks, or stale YouTube videos. Almost every band signed to Fueled By Ramen cites Weezer as an influence. If I made a playlist of “the good Weezer songs not on the debut,” it would run about an hour, and every one of those songs is only really good in a live concert setting. Bassist and songwriter Matt Sharp left the band after Pinkerton somewhat acrimoniously, and with him he took all the harmonic complexity that makes the Blue Album more than “catchy.”
I absolutely love this album despite everything. While its relationship to Pixies’ Doolittle betrays them as the commercial correction to Nirvana, Weezer’s appeal lines them up alongside The Cars, Cheap Trick, Kiss. On this album, they’re writing extremely crunchy pop music that sounds phenomenal loud. Sharp and Patrick Wilson (no relation) make a perfect rhythm section responding to Cuomo’s best hooks. And I mean best hooks by a lot – Cuomo never wrote anything quite as complex and interesting as “Holiday”’s soaring, interlacing chorus, very consciously modeled after The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds but sung without any of the beauty of Al Jardine or the Wilsons. It’s yelled more than sung, the “Heart! Beat!” call and response – until the even more explicit Beach Boys breakdown, which is sung in a clean, low baritone.
He never wrote anything as pleasantly catchy as the “Buddy Holly” chorus, either. The verse is kind of a mess, a weird yelp over a fairly simple guitar part. But it builds perfectly into that chorus, the little “Ooh oohs!” setting up that “Ooh wee ooh!” so nicely. And then, of course, that iconic, corny, major key solo. Almost half of this album has been isolated and dissected into memes, maybe none more than “Buddy Holly,” and yet it can’t spoil the fun of just listening to the damn song for me.
Every year I end up relistening to this album and end up with different favorite songs. This time, “The World Has Turned And Left Me Here,” “Undone (The Sweater Song)” and “Holiday” jump out – sometimes, it’s “Surf Wax America,” “In The Garage,” “Only In Dreams.” It’s, admittedly, almost never “My Name Is Jonas,” though I love playing it in Guitar Hero! And it’s almost never “No One Else” though I dig its uptempo groove and the way Cuomo sings “Hou-ow-ow-ow-ouse!” but is Cuomo at his more toxic incel vibe. That ends up dominating Pinkerton, an album I spend very little time with, and then all edge is flushed out by The Green Album in ‘01, making music only for commercials afterward. As I said, there’s some catchy tunes left. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s basically this one album, an album you can warp into the dumbest configurations and then still come back and love.
I SAW THE TV GLOW Dir. Jane Schoenbrun 2024 PVOD, may still be in theaters near you!
This piece alludes to spoilers for the film I Saw The TV Glow – CW for intense depictions of gender dysphoria.
I Saw The TV Glow is a horror fantasy film about two teenagers, Owen (Justice Smith) and Mattie (Brigette Lundy-Paine,) who bond over their love of a monster of the week TV show The Pink Opaque. Owen isn’t allowed to watch it because the show is broadcast past his bedtime, dictated not by overprotectiveness (this stays true into high school) but by a distant, controlling father. So Mattie leaves Owen VHS tapes of the show – the film plays the development of their relationship in gorgeous lighting and on-screen marker-work while a great original Caroline Polachek song plays. It is not the first or last great original song in the film. One night, Owen asks if he can stay up and watch the season finale himself. Owen’s dad asks him upon hearing the request, “Isn’t that a girls’ show?”
When I was growing up, I was introduced to anime somewhere around the age of six or seven. I don’t actually remember which came first between Sailor Moon and Pokemon – they came roughly together. My parents applied zero “isn’t that a girl’s show” pressure around me watching Sailor Moon, they bought me the tapes. If anything, Mom’s shared with me that her attitude was always that they actively encouraged us to engage with entertainment in an ungendered way, to enjoy what I enjoyed so long as it was age appropriate. But by third grade, the boys in my cul-de-sac who would introduce me to internet porn a year later called it a girls’ show, and those tapes never came back out again.
Owen and Mattie first meet when Owen is in the seventh grade, played by Ian Foreman. The central three performances in this film by Justice Smith as Owen, Brigette Lundy-Paine as Maddy, and Ian Foreman as Owen in the first twenty minutes, are all astonishing. There’s an astonishing degree of trust and immersion in the day-to-day awkwardness of being a teenager that comes along with the deadly suffering of repression. Lundy-Paine gets to transform this over the runtime of the movie into a confidence, their final monologue one of the film’s few empowering and energizing scenes.
Jane Schoenbrun (left) directing.
I Saw The TV Glow is a film about gender dysphoria. It is about an oppressive world that hates you for who you may not even yet know yourself to be. This hatred plays out in Small Horror Ways, microaggressions and hard stares, and in Big Horror Ways, in makeup and special effects and blood and ooze. It is also about trying to find community over the smallest of connections and finding a friendship that feels like a home. It’s not all oppression and despair, but I would not call it a “fun watch” or “inspiring representation!”
Inspiration is still happening, though – director Jane Schoenbrun, talking to Jordan Raup, said “I’d say at about a third––if not half––of the screenings that I’ve been to with the film, some shy person has sauntered up to me afterwards and been like, “That was it.”
I kind of can’t stop reading about this film, interviews with critics like Willow Maclay, Juan Barquin, and Charles Pulliam-Moore informing the writing of this piece. Alongside them, a chorus of trans viewers feel I Saw The TV Glow will save lives. When I tried to say those words to friends after my screening, I started breaking down crying again.
Justice Smith gives a performance I can’t stop thinking about. One of the most painful scenes in the movie is a scene where Smith gets to perform full slapstick comedy. He manages to make his body move like Scooby Doo at a moment where you desperately want him to face his fears. Another early scene, his first confession of his sense of difference, is an astonishing performance of vulnerability of evil thoughts directed at the self, presented like it’s normal because he’s only sort of sure that it isn’t normal and he’s not just being dramatic. This performance carries trauma the way Sheryl Lee carries trauma in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. It is in the body as much as the voice and the mind, but it is also normalized, casual, and deeply painful. The feelings he is carrying are so private that he is compartmentalizing them from himself, repressing as much as possible.
I came out as nonbinary to myself and close family and friends shortly after the election of Donald Trump. That night, the terror and overriding anger it made me feel, made me realize that the relationship I had to that man, and all men, was not one of shared identity and shame. It was a question I’d had lingering in the back of my mind for years as I found myself gravitating toward trans artists, writers, and style icons, and that pushed me over the edge. I tried using they/them pronouns briefly and found it hard to recognize people were talking about me – I moved back to he/him pronouns and, for the most part, I’ve talked about my identity a few times a year before putting it back on the shelf to deal with later.
The overriding feeling of pain and the panic attack I had when the film cut to credits confused me. I didn’t have an egg to crack – what was happening? After taking a week to process, I’ve accepted that what I’ve been doing was grieving all the time I’ve lost. If this film had existed a decade ago, I might have confronted some of my insecurity, anger, and repression a lot sooner, before it led to lashing out at myself and loved ones. I might not have put my identity on a shelf rather than owning it, talking about it often, taking pride in who I am rather than regarding it like car repairs I’m putting off.
Schoenbrun’s previous film, We’re All Going to The World’s Fair, was in my roundup of the best films of 2022. I described the film foremost as about feeling small and childish in a room (the internet) where you suddenly realize everyone else thinks you’re acting out. That feeling of the judgment of others looms over huge swaths of I Saw The TV Glow, and it results in Owen losing weeks or years of time to a passive sense of “trans time,” as Schoenbrun calls it. There is a disconnection from everything because Owen’s own role in that life feels wrong. Like the sense of online immaturity in World’s Fair, I relate to this feeling of time slipping.
I can’t stress enough that this film is immaculate, gorgeous and inventive in cinematic language, funny and scary and beautifully acted. I also accept that I’m not going to be normal about this movie. This is the most impactful a new release has been on me in a decade. I can’t and don’t expect people to have the same reaction to it. The enormity of this film makes me feel small and childish, and maybe I will look back on this version of myself the way I have looked at the smaller, more childish versions of myself over the years. As Maddy insists, I will not apologize for it. We are always becoming new versions of ourselves – the film’s signature line is a chalk scrawl which reads, ”There is still time.”
Fez is the first video game I had to start keeping a notebook to complete. On the surface, Fez is a classic pixel art puzzle platformer with a twist – all of its 2D environments actually exist in 3D, and by hitting the controller triggers, you can rotate the world to another perspective and see a new part of the level. The primary action is jumping around collecting golden cubes (or, for extra challenge, the purple anti-cubes.) Collect all of them and ascend into the monolithic hypercube for a light show akin to Beyond the Infinite from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The world of Fez is a brightly colored collection of floating islands, the primary sensibility being comic. In the town where your avatar Gomez lives, his neighbors largely deny the presence of a third dimension, living a life unaware of a world beyond home (the door is on the back of the 3D island.) There is a factory zone where little billboards in some sort of cube language are accompanied by portraits of Gomez’s Doughboy-like kinsmen. Little pixel frogs ribbit and little pixel gulls caw. The animals, little machines, and bouncy mushrooms are all animated with the kind of charm that rewards attention to small details.
But whatever is Beyond the Infinite is encroaching on this world. Breaking into the third dimension seems to have broken something – as you continue to explore, more and more of the world crumbles into what seem to be black holes, tears in the fabric of reality that Gomez can disappear into. (The game is very forgiving with respawns, finding whatever solid ground you last set foot on and quickly depositing Gomez back to where he can stand passively.) The majority of the sense of peril in this game stems from the early career score by John Carpenter synth descendant Disasterpeace (It Follows, Mini Metro,Under the Silver Lake.) Some tracks are peaceful, others majestic, others energizing – but when he aims for horror, the sense of dread that envelops everything still chills me.
Math class.
After the credits, Fez loops back into a “new game plus” that offers a new first-person perspective and new rewards for earning all 32 golden cubes and all 32 anti-cubes. Doing so involves ascending into Fez’s true difficulty. Fez is not, at its core, a puzzle platformer. The game transcends into a game about archeology. It involves looking for ciphers and decoding ancient language. It involves reading ancient star maps to understand how ancestors looked to the stars. It involves, well, taking notes. The obvious comparison point for games critics in 2012 was Myst. But I haven’t played more than a half hour of Myst – when indie games center on this kind of meta-puzzle, like the brilliant Outer Wilds or this year’s Animal Well, I compare them to Fez.
There is something so immensely rewarding to me about this kind of language game. I’m bad at learning languages in real life – I think in English. I recognize our language’s many, many faults and confusions, but it is the system I understand. While Fez does have a literal language cipher (one that conforms to English directly) it also offers other, less linguistic symbols. Fez doesn’t just challenge the player to solve puzzles – it challenges the player to learn How To Learn. It invites you into a game world with very limited information, gives you everything you need to solve it and hands you the reins to pursue as much knowledge as you care to collect.
The maddening thing about a cipher game is that it is a one-and-done experience. I cannot un-ring the bell. Walking through Fez’s world, the solutions that were once obscure and required meticulous attention to detail are immediately obvious. Being in Fez’s game world is pleasant, listening to Disasterpeace’s score. Some of its platforming challenges are rewarding in the same way replaying a Mario game can be. There are moments of knowing I’ve solved something before but not remembering the exact solution. I used to consider Fez the greatest game I’d ever played. Not being able to recapture that experience will sort of always crystallize it as the best game I played when I was 20 years old.
Fez was a five year passion project, and one of the early examples of a breakout indie game. Unfortunately, Fez ended up being the end of a sentence for its developers rather than the beginning. Even before release, lead designer Phil Fish was considered by entitled gamers to be a blowhard who would never release his game. Then, Fez came out and was extremely buggy, resulting in dismissal from would-be fans (the game works great now.) And then Fish became one of the few male voices standing up to #GamerGate’s bigotry, eventually resulting in him exiting the game industry. Fish will likely never make a game again. The spirit of Fez lives on, but how quickly we silence our own luminaries.
I remember a high school night hanging out with an ex-girlfriend and her friends at IHOP till around two in the morning where one of the metalheads at our table invited me out to his car to listen to a song he was really excited about. The song was Dream Theater’s “Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence,” which he did not inform me was 42 minutes long. I got out around minute 10 to go back to my date, but I’ve never forgotten that introduction. I ended up seeing Dream Theater with him a few years later.
Let me inform you that while the original version of Sleep’s Dopesmoker (released as Jerusalem in 1997) broke its 52 minute runtime into six tracks, the version I know is a full eleven minutes longer and presented as one song. That ends up being more true to the listening experience anyway – while there are movements and instrumental breaks, the experience of Dopesmoker is largely one outstanding build, grooving on this one riff and a seemingly eternal drone. Some people might find it too heavy, too oppressive – as far as metal riffs go, I feel it maintains a level of pleasant record store noise. Avoiding harsh noise, blast beasts, staying in a guitar tone without the shrill soloing of Kerry King or Steve Vai – it’s not quite “optimistic” music, but it never signals doom, either.
That drone doesn’t get repetitive because Sleep is just so fucking conversational with their playing. They will introduce new notes, fills, and solos with such a casual approach to the spotlight. Because there is such consistency within the album’s sonic vocabulary, changes in time signature and in and out of sung verse come and go almost without notice. There’s a drum part that comes in around the 35 minute mark that electrifies the same guitar riff under an entirely new energy, and then just as quickly the drums back out and let the guitar charge some speed on their own. When the drums come back, they return to the rhythm the album began with, but the guitar has built new layers and the bass is filling new gaps. It progresses over the hour long runtime into something that Black Sabbath would envy.
The lyrics themselves, which tell the story of a modern stoner “weedian” being transported back to Biblical Nazareth and recreating the world’s image under the Weed Seed of Eden, are performed in a growling chant. The actual process of memorizing and recording this is an almost comical and nightmarish story of battling the equipment and finding that once they started playing, the song got slower, “freakier.”
David Rees referred to this album as like a “Mark Rothko painting hitting you over the head with a bag of hammers” in the New York Times. The album can either place you into a ceaseless meditation on a comforting surface or you can listen attentively for every textured brush stroke. I could honestly listen to another hour of Dopesmoker. I could loop this shit. It’s like sitting by a waterfall. Writing about Dopesmoker, I am both inviting you out to my car to hang out for an hour and fully aware that your date is back in the restaurant. Maybe instead we’ll just set aside an afternoon to sit in the sun and listen on a Bluetooth speaker.
CATALOG CHOICE: The Sciences (if you’re new to Sleep or sludge/stoner metal generally, I’d probably recommend The Sciences first!)
It’s hard to overstate the dominance Ferris Bueller’s Day Off had over the entire rest of the 80s catalog growing up in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. Sick days, substitute teachers, pizza parties, Von Steuben Day Parade, school field trips to the Art Institute, this was as constant a companion as The Indian in the Cupboard or Newsies. I went to a talent show at Glenbrook North with a friend back in high school, and they were still constantly referencing Ferris in 2010. One of my mom’s OTs claimed he was “the guy who did the flip” during the “Twist & Shout” sequence.
Until Mean Girls and Fall Out Boy, Ferris was our pop culture representation. And, frankly, he probably still overshadows either one when it comes to relating to one another. We love the Art Institute – we love Wrigley – we love our sausage and want it to overshadow any fine dining establishments we might have in the city. We don’t have an entire city of women as hot as Jennifer Grey and Mia Sara, but we celebrate those women where they exist.
Scolds have given this film something of a beating, insisting Ferris is a bad person. This line of criticism is noxious to begin with (Ferris is my friend!,) but it also misunderstands Ferris’s dramatic function. Ferris isn’t an audience cipher or a real person – he’s Bugs Bunny, set loose in a Looney Toon with Alan Ruck’s sad sack Cameron and the Fuddian Dean Rooney. If he’s aspirational, he’s aspirational the way a cryptid is aspirational. God forbid we have a little fun in this world.
I actually do think this is misunderstood partly because of other John Hughes films like The Breakfast Club or Planes, Trains & Automobiles, which are more humanistic approaches with deeply flawed characters. Hughes set out to make a hypercapable character who can handle anything who comes his way. He comes across as a funny sociopath, but he also really loves Sloane and Cameron. I love the guy. I wish I had that spark. The film teaches you how to watch it, too – it makes space for people who can’t stand Ferris from the start and then asks you what harm he’s really doing.
This film also employs one of Hollywood’s greatest cinematographers of all time, Tak Fujimoto. Fujimoto’s first credits include Terence Malick’s Badlands, exploitation greats like Switchblade Sisters and Death Race 2000, and the original Star Wars – he became famous for his collaborations with Jonathan Demme on films like The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia and his later work with M. Night Shyamalan on The Sixth Sense and Signs. There is an incredible tactility to Fujimoto’s choice of lighting and lensing in every shot of this film, and the framing he chooses to match Hughes’ blocking makes the Art Institute sequence one of the most beautiful in film history. A moment like Cameron looking at Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jette is, for my money, an instant admission to the all time hall of fame.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is a home for me. I have so many memories both of watching the film itself and of being in the places it depicts. I remember old friends and their families. Revisiting it always brings me a lot of joy, and I get the stupid “Oh Yeah” Yello song stuck in my head every time. If someone asked me if I wanted to get some Portillo’s and throw it on this minute, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Sounds like a great afternoon.
Depression Quest is a twenty minute narrative game that exists in text, a few scanned polaroids, and some sparse music. You read an account of living with debilitating mental illness and select responses the way you do at the end of a page in a choose your own adventure book. The development software, Twine, simplifies the process of flipping to page 94 by keeping all the threads invisible to the player. It’s very easy to work with, to the point where I’ve developed a couple of very short games in the system (none of which are currently online.)
The game’s primary innovation in the interactive fiction space is crossing out and making inaccessible some of the “healthier” responses to stressors or anxieties of daily life. It communicates very effectively the cognitive dissonance mental illness sometimes creates, where you know it would be better to call and cancel plans but conflict avoidance results in you just lying in bed until you get the “dude wtf” text. It would be better to take a shower and make a meal that actually has some real nutrition, but drinking too much beer is a lot more accessible right now.
There are other, equally brilliant games in the Twine space. One of my favorites, my father’s long long legs, is a fun horror short story similar in tone to some of Stephen King’s best. Another, With Those We Love Alive, combines folklore and fantasy storytelling to aim for a more literary direction. I spend a lot of time on itch.io, playing the free games that float to the top of their recommendations. Most are just fun little mechanics explored in a small game, and occasionally there’s some really wonderful narrative play happening.
A world outside of commercial video games used to be a lot more exciting. Just before the fall, it was chronicled in Anna Anthropy’s Rise of the Video Game Zinesters, a narrative of queer and feminist indie game developers creating new and exciting small games that cannot exist with the purpose of generating profit and appealing to the masses. Both Anna Anthropy and the author of With Those We Love Alive have since been credibly accused of abuse. The Video Game Zinesters are maybe the most fractured creative art scene I’ve ever followed. Most retreated from the public gaming sphere entirely when #Gamergate set its ire against them pretty directly, the movement stemming from a positive write-up of Depression Quest on Kotaku.
These small games I love are still being made, but the effort it takes to get people to play them is growing every year. The rise of gaming blockbusters like The Last of Us, God of War, Alan Wake, and my beloved Like a Dragon games have led to games as narrative artistry looking more like soap opera TV and cinema. Even some of the people who grew out of this scene, like Sam Barlow of Immortality and the post-Telltale effort of Campo Santo, have moved bigger and farther away from mechanics first storytelling. It’s not that I want these specific people back making the games again. But replaying Depression Quest is a reminder of a time where the future of games looked unpredictable because the possibilities were endless rather than because the arms race of the mass market was simply unsustainable.
All My Friends 