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momestuck · 5 years

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Let’s read Hiveswap Friendsim - volume 10!

We’re over the halfway mark. Nineteen friends. This time, Of Faraway Lands and Nearby Pals.

Our trolls are going to be...

These two.

Incidentally, I haven’t commented, but every troll select screen has a different drawing when you mouseover the troll. Usually they’re just the same troll with a light shining on them, looking more enthusiastic, but you gotta see Tegiri’s one...

In addition to the Jojo-like art style, that’s the katakana character ゴ ‘go’ repeated. For some reason, katakana is commonly used over hiragana for sound effects in manga, such as laughter. So yeah. We’ve finally found the mall katana guy mentioned waaaaay back in Polypa’s route!

Oddly, while ‘Tegiri’ would be valid romaji (although not, I checked, on lists of Japanese names I could find... I wouldn’t want to guess at a pseudo-’translation’, there’s a few possibilities), ‘Kalbur’ is decidedly not, and would be turned into something like ‘karuburu’ if it was transliterated into Japanese. That might be significant...

But that’s as far as my rudimentary Japanese knowledge can take me. We’ll come back to Tegiri shortly. First of all, it’s...

youtube

...beloved The Magic Roundabout character, Zebedee!

I really hope that’s not a coincidence.

Zebede

Zebede is the third and final troll by Magdalena Clarke, author of Vikare and Elwurd. Well, I enjoyed Elwurd, so that’s a good sign... hopefully...

This begins with getting a chittr notification. God, push notifications, am I right?

The name suggests we’re going to deal with the bees that made Sollux’s ‘mind honey’, granting goldbloods fantastic powers. (The game seems to have decisively chosen ‘gold’ rather than ‘yellow’, so I will defer to this.)

Who is this new friend? It seems to be someone who knows Cirava...

Their speech quirk seems to be using z in place of s, but not always.

Zebede invites us to download a video chat app...

Surprisingly, this does not result in our phone getting inducted into a botnet. Apparently the app we downloaded is called ‘grype’.

It’s weird to have so many Skype jokes given that Skype has pretty much given way to other messaging apps, at least in my experience...

He’s really excited to hear about how we know Cirava, and we tell him. He lets on rather unsubtly that he’s lonely and would appreciate a visit. Apparently he lives a long way out, for the sake of the bees.

We get our first choice...

Honestly no idea which one is the instant death option here. Probably asking if it’s really fine, but the ways we die are so random in this game, who knows?

Let’s go with asking where he lives.

We mention we went out to visit Skylla in the countryside, which leads him to... more self-deprecation. Wow, this guy sure is insecure.

And he decides like... we’re not really interested in visiting him. ‘A wall has been raised’, as the game puts it.

Dude, no wonder you don’t have friends.

OK, well, that was a short branch. Let’s try asking about his living situation and his lusus, whether it’s really fine.

Ah yes, play on his feelings of resentment. Get him to complain and wheedle in that way. That’s our narrator.

This guy’s face is so... pointy... I don’t have much commentary to add.

This leads us to a non-choice of saying we’ll go visit him immediately. This seems like a really healthy, non-manipulative friendship we’ve got going on here.

Apparently Zebede’s got some of whatever concentrated loneliness and fetishisation of friendship our narrator is suffering.

The narrator goes through a few friends to try and figure out who to get a lift from... and after rejecting Tagora, Amisia, Zebruh (oh god no), taxis and public transport, they decide the only option is to do crimes. Hey, I can get behind it.

By crimes they mean, finding an unlocked car and nicking it. Unlike Konyyl, they can’t punch locks off.

Apparently we know how to turn on the auto-pilot in a troll car. Not sure when we figured that one out!

Fittingly, Zebede’s hive is full of bees.

Inside, too, it’s a nice rustic bee farm.

We get a text message from... Cirava, it turns out. I wonder what they want...

We have the choice of ignoring it or letting it go to voicemail. Wow, we’re getting a lot of phone calls in this episode! Let’s try chatting with Cirava, maybe we can invite them over and all chill here...

It’s nice to see Cirava again. The protagonist’s weird obsession with collecting more friends instead of spending time with the ones they’ve made is highlighted...

What’s up with that?

The matter of Cirava’s clothes comes up.

Oh right so that’s what happened to Cirava’s clothes... I honestly forgot.

Anyway, Cirava’s a little worried when we say we’re hanging out with Zebede, who they know by chittr handle if not by name. They are worried that we’re tight, and we say we’re working on it.

Called out!

Anyway, Cirava warns us about getting too close to Zebede, and links... his fanfiction. OK, sure. It turns out to be... RPF. Of Cirava.

Oh dear, we’re gonna get into the RPF discourse in this episode, huh? That is something I generally want to stay a long way away from.

Anyway, Zebede comes back while we’re reading one of his fics.

That sure is an expression.

Anyway, when we explain that Cirava linked this, Zebede decides we’re not prioritising him after all, and clearly Cirava is more important than him.

I’m really not sure we want to be this guy’s friend.

He breaks down crying at the perceived slight of mentioning that we have other friends.

The protagonist starts feeling like a dick. There’s a poke at the blurry line between inner monologue and spoken dialogue on the protagonist’s part...

But anyway, that’s that for Zebede’s route.

So, how do we actually befriend this guy? Trick seems to be to pretend we care about literally nothing other than him, I guess. So let’s go back and ignore Cirava’s grype call.

Instead of answering the call, we work on our chittr profile. God, that’s hard enough irl, let alone when you’re on an alien planet...

So, we assure Zebede that we weren’t about to take a call in the middle of a hang sesh, and he starts showing us some pirate films. Then, switches to space pirate films. Poor guy’s really thrown for a loop by our indecisiveness.

The narrator is sympathetic, but unhelpful. Honestly narrator, just pick something. Fake some enthusiasm. If you really want to be friends with this kid...

We suggest watching the last thing he watched on grubtube. Which... seems like a shitty suggestion to me, since like, if it’s the last thing you watched...

But to Zebede, that seems to be something much worse.

You promise you absolutely won’t judge him. We may regret this.

Mostly, it turns out to be videos of Cirava. Yeah, we get it, he’s got a crush.

He shows us some music videos of a group called hatched2dance. I’m guessing this is a KPop (or perhaps JPop) parody, especially given the whole RPF angle...

Honestly like I probably couldn’t stand this guy in real life but I have some sympathies for his whole awkward gay teenager reading fic thing.

Anyway, seeing themselves reflected in Zebede prompts some reflection in the narrator.

The narrator has kind of a freakout on realising how offputting they’ve been - that they’ve been ‘a big phony’.

We’re saved from an existential crisis by someone showing up to reclaim their scuttlebuggy.

The narrator decides they should probably go out and face the music before this troll carves their way into the hive. This wins over Zebede even harder.

We learn that Zebede’s psychic power is... controlling bees. Using the bees, they drive off the troll outside.

And so we chill with Zebede, and the protagonist takes notes on ‘not being such a desperate piece of shit’.

We’ll see if this whole change of heart actually lasts.

The Alternian text in the picture says ‘ALTERNIA K-POP ALL-STARS’ in the Hiveswap version of the alphabet. Just in case you had any doubt what videos he’s into.

Tegiri

And now... time for things to get anime. This is the debut of David Turnbull.

The protagonist notices the edges of sunrise, and concludes they need to make a friend before daybreak. At that moment, someone accosts them.

Tegiri also gets chiptunes, in common with our other anime troll. I think it’s a remix of one of the tracks elsewhere in Homestuck. But it could easily fit in with a genuine 8-bit game.

Reassuringly, Tegiri concludes that since we’re an alien not a troll, he doesn’t have to cull us.

His typing quirk is that he replaces the letter ‘L’ with slashes.

And his character trait is, sure enough...

HUGE WEEB. Though, glass houses, stones, etc....

Naturally, the initial instant death choice is...

Unusually, we get three choices.

I can assert with 100% confidence that if I click anything other than ‘subs’, I will be executed by katana. So let’s try... both are good.

He casts us out for our indecisiveness.

The Alternian text here reads ‘PATHETIC.’ The drawing here recalls a particular anime meme... after some digging I was able to identify it as a screencap of Asuka from eva:

Think this is probably from End of Evangelion? But I can’t really recall.

...god I’m not helping my case for not being as much a weeb as Tegiri here, am I?

OK, let’s try subs now.

...lol, I’m wrong. He prefers dubs. What kind of weeb is this guy?

However, even though we’re wrong on the Most Important Question, we get to come back to his hive.

We can see body pillows around his recuperacoon, an improbable number of katanas, a bunch of figurines... the text above his bed says OPPAI, which is, well... Japanese for boobs. Yeah.

If you look closely at the anime figurines, I’m sure you can identify a few.

But except for Luffy in top right, I’m not sure about the rest. Someone who knows more about anime, feel free to fill me in. Bottom right might be a machine lifeform from NieR Automata, but that seems too recent, and wouldn’t 2B be a more in-character one for him to have?

Anyway...

I like how this casually assumes that the reader knows what an otaku is, but then again who reads Homestuck without knowing that I guess.

The narration says Tegiri has sorted his merch by blood colour, which is like... contradicted by the illustration which clearly has a bronzeblood troll at the top, but who cares I guess.

This guy is just too quotable lol.

Anyway, we get to meet a lusus again. This time, the lusus is actually drawn, not just a filtered stock photo!

It’s also mildly terrifying :D

It’s called Tadashi Inu, which means... well it kind of doesn’t mean anything (‘however dog’???), but if it was Tadashii Inu, it would mean Correct Dog.

Anyway, naturally what does an anime club do but watch anime?

He’s presently in the middle of watching ‘Philosopher’s Half-Iron’, which I’m guessing is a joke about Fullmetal Alchemist? Instead, he proposes Schoolfed Heroism (BNHA maybe?) and Kismet:Stuck Morning (no guesses for this one... I’m a fake weeb).

It’s also interesting that we’re watching on DVDs. If they wanted to go full weeb, they could put in fansub jokes here... but then this guy prefers dubs to subs, so maybe he likes to buy official releases.

Naturally, we run into translation issues.

He wanted the first edition and ‘paid extra for it’. So rather than enjoy the rest of the episode, we set off to have a word with the importer...

I have to ask... how does the troll economy work? There’s hints at a capitalist economy, money is mentioned and we had the guy running the club just now, but none of the trolls seem to have jobs. They seem to just get issued money according to their blood colour?

Speaking of which, we get some comments on troll retail...

So yeah, we’re gonna find another weeb I guess.

If that’s the billboard in the background, it's too small and blurry to work out what it says, unfortunately.

He seems pretty opposed to any ‘rebel sentiments’. Which of course he discusses with the weebiest metaphors. Alternia balances on...

He goes on about katanas for a while, like he’s going down a checklist of orientalist tropes. Naturally it’s a prelude to a challenge to ‘dance’.

We say swords are cool and this gets a little rant about bushido. You know, that self-serving horseshit some guy in the late 1800s fabricated as nationalist mythology...

We arrive at the anime store.

More text to transcribe, oh joy. At the top of the store it says the name of the shop, mentioned in dialogue, ‘SUPER TOPATO IMPORTS’. Above the door behind the counter it says ‘EMPLOYEES ONLY’. On the bookshelf full of manga it says something too squished to easily read.

Anyway, we’re having a look around, but Tegiri starts kicking up a stink.

It’s basically the navy seal copypasta, slightly modified to be more trollish.

Meanwhile we’ve accidentally knocked some anime and manga out of someone’s hand.

Still not getting these references, unfortunately.

The troll with a pink sign is apparently against troll law - ‘depiction of nonstandard hemological attributes’.

This is all going over my head at this point. The references, I mean. Obviously the text - that Tegiri is an entitled douchebag - is clear enough.

Oh, this one I get - Ace Attorney, of course.

Anyway, this is where we get a choice. Do we stop Tegiri straight up murdering someone for peddling the wrong kind of anime?

Obviously we will try. Even though this seems like a great way to end up dead ourselves.

We speak up for the shopkeeper, and manage to convince Tegiri not to straight-up kill him. This leads to... a story, of a previous time he showed mercy, in contradiction to the law.

Of course, we know who this baby - who should have been culled for lacking a lusus, by troll law - would have been. God, I’d sure rather be hanging out with Polypa than this guy.

The narrator, of course, has one thing on their mind...

We suggest that the law, and what is right, are maybe not the same thing...?

The hard decisions such as ‘do I murder this baby?’

The narrator decides they know something about bad ways to manage loneliness...

The narrator manages to divert his rant by asking about his eyes. Which are... any guesses? Contact lenses. For cosplay.

Before we can make the error of accusing him of breaking the law by cosplaying a nonexistent blood caste, who should show up but...

Oh thank god. Save us, Polypa.

Of course he says 何 nani instead of ‘what’. And as for 後輩 kōhai, that’s basically the counterpart to senpai, the junior partner in an informal hierarchy within an organisation, dictating the use of certain honorifics. If my reading of the wiki article is right, he’s using it quite incorrectly.

Polypa lets on that we’re moirails. This causes Tegiri to be a little taken aback. The narration has some fun.

Tegiri claims - despite his huge stack of body pillows and figurines - that he has no time for quadrants.

‘Were it not for the laws of this land’ is most commonly associated with a meme from a Ghanaian film, not anime, but the sentiment surely fits.

Polypa tries to talk some sense into him.

So we end up doing an anime sleepover...

The dog is saying ワンワン (wanwan), which is standard Japanese onomatopoeia for a dog barking.

The text in this screen says... ‘Ore wa kaizoku-ou ni naru otoko da!’, which is a One Piece reference, meaning ‘I'm the man who will be the pirate king!’.

So, Tegiri may be insufferable, but at least with Polypa around we can keep him more or less under control.

There’s a few more options to explore. What if we’d picked dubs, not subs, near the start? He praises our choice, but otherwise, the story proceeds in the same way. I think that’s actually the first time we’ve had branches merge.

Now, what if we let him kill the shopkeeper?

Shockingly, he’s not as much a swordsman as he makes out. And the shopkeeper, it turns out, is psychic, and zaps him before legging it.

I was under the impression that psychic abilities were rare in goldbloods, but what do I know?

We ask like... was that really necessary?

Well, he’s certainly a tool, he got that part right. (Sorry.)

We go to report the shopkeeper’s terrible crimes to the drone, but unfortunately... it seems that the protagonist has a rap sheet themselves!

They can’t pin it on us! We’re innocent!

God, the ‘everything happened’ approach to continuity is still fucking with me. Did we make friends with Remele? Did we not? Earlier, the narration mentioned making ‘between 1 and 19′ friends. What if someone didn’t obsessively explore and replay every branch? They’d be so confused!

But despite his ineptitude with a sword, our attempted escape over an overpass leaves us...

Dead.

I’m sure this shot is also an allusion to an anime meme, but I can’t say which one, so yeah.

That’s Zebede and Tegiri. Not the best friends we’ve made, but I enjoyed the chance to be a huggggeee neeeerrrd in this post. (>implying that I could be anything other than a huge nerd on my homestuck liveread blog)

#momestuck #lets read hiveswap friendsim

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deadskepticfiles · 5 years

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THE DREAMING PROPHET: EPISODE 5 TRANSCRIPT

EPISODE FIVE: A LIGHT IN THE DARK (LINK)

Our kind was never meant to wake, but we sure are awake now. We can thank "the Adversary" for that - but who is he, really? Talking points: Thee-I-Dare, past and present, a spot of theory, and a community talk. Featuring guest, Fluffy Raven.

Spoiler + Content warning begins at 1:25. Content warnings: General horror, harm to children, death, genocide.

- lavanya: host, transcript, video editor, asset artist, speak-as-one's #1 fan

- astriferal: host, audio editor, puncher of things

- be11amy: advertising, fact-checking

- fluffy_raven: guest

- xaviul: moral support

- intro & outro music, "ringing bells": a weirdly handsome individual

- transition audio clips, music, voice lines: the blackout club/question games

- weird ambiance: Magmi Soundtracks on freesound (https://freesound.org/people/Magmi.Soundtracks/sounds/475737/)

- the blackout club: question games (https://www.blackoutclubgame.com

LAVANYA: Good evening, Red Acre~, and welcome to the Dreaming Prophet. Tonight, we're going to do something a little different. I'm going to ask you to sit back, close your eyes, and cast your mind back all the way out into the murky depths of our origin, ten thousand generations ago.

LAVANYA: Look at the sky. Look at the stars, and look at the sun shining down on that upright ape.

LAVANYA: Watch as the sun guides IT - your ancestors - your grandmothers! - leading them out of the cruelty of the darkness and into the warmth of the light.

LAVANYA: Open your eyes. Look to the sky.

LAVANYA: Will you let it lead you?

LAVANYA: My name is Lavanya -.

ASTRO: And I'm Astro.

LAVANYA: And tonight, we're leading a very special episode of the Dreaming Prophet. That's a joke, because every single episode is special and unique in its own individual way.

ASTRO: This is a Blackout Club show for Blackout Club players with minimal speculation, all lore, and a focus on the known facts. Tonight, our topic of the day is Thee-I-Dare. We'll be talking in-depth about this Daimon for the first half of our episode.

ASTRO: We are going to get into the spoiler and content warnings as always with the Dreaming Prophet. If this is your first time tuning in and you are not keen on hearing spoilers about the lore of the Blackout Club, this is your chance to pop on.

LAVANYA: We will be discussing basically every aspect of Thee-I-Dare lore that is available in-game! So, our general content warnings for this are the same as usual: general horror, mention of children being harmed, and to be more explicit given that this is Thee-I-Dare, we will be discussing the specific death of named NPCs, and the overall death of a large number of unnamed NPCs.

LAVANYA: One of the core aspects of Thee-I-Dare's lore is the Cull, which is a historical genocide that occurred in Red Acre, in which Thee-I-Dare's hosts were collected and killed by Speak-as-One.

LAVANYA: In tonight's special guests is Fluffy Raven. Fluffy Raven will be helping us deal with the exciting topic of Thee-I-Dare, and giving us an insight into her own personal views of him. Hi Fluffy!

RAVEN: Hi, my name's Fluffy Raven. You can find me sprinkled throughout the Blackout Club community, whether it's in the discord, or just meandering about online in game. I am one of Thee-I-Dare's chosen and I'm here to talk about it today.

LAVANYA: Sometimes we say that Thee-I-Dare's followers can be a little overenthusiastic, but honestly, when we talk about people raving, we're mostly just talking about Raven.

ASTRO: Let's start off with the question that's on everyone's minds.

LAVANYA: Who is Thee-I-Dare?

RAVEN: When the game was originally coming out, Thee-I-Dare was more so known for his rebellious nature. An example of this would be when his siblings and his maker basically said - don't come to Red Acre, and that he was not invited -.

RAVEN: He ended up showing up anyway, because they told him not to come. If you were to stumble upon Thee-I-Dare today, and Red Acre, you would more likely find out that he represents individuality and choice.

LAVANYA: And presumably, that's been the case throughout most of his life. We don't exactly know much about Thee-I-Dare historically: who he's been in the past, what he's done, or where he's gone, but what we do know is a few scattered facts from various individuals throughout Red Acre.

LAVANYA: One of them is - per Laugh-Last, who is definitely, definitely a reliable narrator, absolutely - is that he had a stick up his ass to match SAO back in the day, back when he was still in tight with his makers. We also know that, even though Thee-I-Dare currently is not really in with Speak-as-One or many of the other gods, in the past he was! And in the past, he went by several other names.. who still exist outside of Red Acre.

LAVANYA: So remember that next time you decide to take a tourist trip.

LAVANYA: In the past, he's also gone by other genders. We know that he's gone by she and her, and possibly others.

LAVANYA: As a side note, what's interesting about the voices is that they do not have the traditional relationship with gender that humans and the player characters might have! Voices are not people. That's always something that's worth emphasizing, and that's always something that kind of plays into what pronouns they use.

LAVANYA: We know that in the past, The-Measure-Cuts has also been referred to as a woman, and we know that Thee-I-Dare has been referred to as a woman in the past. This is not necessarily because of the Daimons exact gender identity - because they don't have bodies, they are voices floating in the void and they are not humans.

LAVANYA: Voices take on the gender of the host whose voice they are using to speak. When The-Measure-Cuts was using a female voice, everyone uses female pronouns. When Thee-I-Dare was using a female voice, everyone use female pronouns. The voice who is the primary means through which Speak-as-One speaks uses them, he/him and she/her pronouns, because the Voice is two different people, a man and a woman speaking in tandem.

LAVANYA: For this episode, though, we will be using he/him pronouns for Thee-I-Dare throughout. Because that is the current gender, as far as we know of, his Voice.

LAVANYA: To get back on topic, even though the Voices are not humans, they do all, with the exception of Speak-as-One, use familial terms to refer to one another. Thee-I-Dare is the first born child of Speak-as-One, and he is the second oldest of the known voices, per Speak-as-One, who, unfortunately, is not always a reliable narrator. He is also the source of some of the other voices.

LAVANYA: We don't know exactly how that works, but in the end, that may just be Speak-as-One being exceptionally petty, as they don't want to admit, that they have countless or nine children that *all* manage to think they are the absolute fucking worst.

RAVEN: From a conversation a few months ago, Speak-as-One claims that the other gods split off from Thee-I-Dare and not from the big baddy themselves.

RAVEN: However, Thee-I-Dare has gone against their claims saying the voices did, in fact, split off of SAO. Right now, there's not a lot of solid facts with that. And this is something that's being disputed over as familial relations are kind of the constant enigma when it comes to the voices.

RAVEN: Thee-I-Dare often rejects being called the title of "parent", because he feels that it's arrogant, in that it denies the role of humans into his coming of existence and that of the other voices. Thee-I-Dare has stated that he believes that humans came first, and were the ones who created Voices in the first place. However, despite with Thee-I-Dare thinking that the title of becoming a "parent" is more on the arrogant side, he has no issues preferring to Speak-as-One as his makers.

RAVEN: Which, this can actually be seen with other voices, such as The-Measure-Cuts calling SAO his progenitor.

RAVEN: After the big event known as the Culling, Thee-I-Dare was left shattered and voiceless - basically a shadow of himself. And because of this he lost contact with his sibling voice. As Thee-I-Dare is regaining his strength, he's been trying to reach out and recreate a relationship with his siblings, and ally with certain voices.

RAVEN: A few examples of these would be: Dies-for-You, Dance-for-Us, and The-Measure-Cuts.

ASTRO: Thee-I-Dare views Speak-as-One as his enemy, and until recently, also thought poorly of the rest of his family. He speaks often about how his family moves together: where one goes, the others will follow as a result. When Speak-as-One created Red Acre, all the other Daimons showed up there. Even though Speak-as-One tried to keep them out -.

LAVANYA: - because, if you recall back to what we were saying just a few minutes ago, it turns out Thee-I-Dare is the spirit of rebellion! The spirit of rebellion: that youthful desire to do exactly what he's told not to do.

LAVANYA: Is it any surprise that most of his hosts have been 13 year old childrnen?

LAVANYA: We don't actually know the chronology of how the voices arrived in Red Acre. What we do know is that Thee-I-Dare himself says that he was one of the last of his family, if not the last, to arrive in Red Acre. When he arrived, he was then betrayed by Laugh-Last, who's probably, although he's never said it -.

LAVANYA: Well, we can all assume here, his least favorite sibling.

LAVANYA: This led to his fragmenting!

LAVANYA: Fragmentation is an interesting process in which a voice's name is stripped into pieces. We don't exactly know how it occurs. What we do know is that, when one voice wants another voice dead, that they will initiate a Cull. The Cull are basically where you track down every single human being that hosts a piece of the Voices name, or the voice themselves, and you kill them. By systematically destroying each host and each part of the voices name, you will kill the name.

LAVANYA: With Thee-I-Dare, for whatever reason, this did not kill him. It resulted in him fragmenting instead into name fragments, which then could be found across the map.

LAVANYA: As of right now, on August 10th, 2019, you can still find name fragments, and we are still finding new ones each and every day, despite the fact that Thee-I-Dare has regained his name, and does, for the most part, appear to be fully functional as a voice.

LAVANYA: What's interesting about the fragmentation is that, initially, the other voices did not seem to care. In the early dream encounters, the voices did not seem interested in Thee-I-Dare at all. Laugh-Last was actively malicious towards him. The-Measure-Cuts was disinterested. Dance-for-Us, while she could be read as sympathetic, was not willing to do anything towards helping him, or helping the players recover his name fragments, and in initial conversations with Thee-I-Dare, the feeling of disinterest and downright animosity were largely mutual.

LAVANYA: While Thee-I-Dare now has begun approaching his siblings with a hand out to try and reconcile the relationship between them, and also gain support in acting against Speak-as-One. In the past, he did not give a single fuck about his siblings, except in terms of how betrayed and how hurt he was in the fact that they had all stood by and watched as their progenitor tried to destroy him.

ASTRO: In much more ancient history, Thee-I-Dare says that he taught human speech - the spoken word - with the help of another unnamed God, a God who supposedly was another version of himself - the spoken word was used to plot in secret again Speak-as-One.

ASTRO: Prior to that, they all used what Speak-as-One refers to as the old tongue, which is dance.

ASTRO: The spoken word was also used to give early humans a sense of self. As they began to speak, they could begin to agree and disagree. They could begin to give opinions, and so on and so forth. It was a tool that allowed them to transcend, or perhaps, simply depart from the idea of one singular collective. He says that these disagreements this sense of identity might be where the other voices came from.

ASTRO: He also says that he invented the lie.

LAVANYA: So now we've covered all the history of Thee-I-Dare, and basically the core of him as a person - as a non-person - as a person who is disembodied - and is also an outright leech who lives inside of your head. The most unique kind of person of all! But that's all in the past. What about Thee-I-Dare right now?

LAVANYA: He is in a lot of ways the face of the voices.

LAVANYA: He is the one that is most commonly encountered by player characters. He is the one that is the most friendly and the most helpful towards player characters. And until recently, he was the most likely to be encountered by a new player.

LAVANYA: Back in the old days, prior to 1.0., what Thee-I-Dare used to do was contact new players. He would speak to them, and ask them for their help, and then he would lead them to the cave fragment. When they closed their eyes, they would see a glowing man in chains. He would ask them for their help, and oftentimes he would give them halos.

LAVANYA: Nowadays, he doesn't do that as much. Thee-I-Dare has regained his name, and he no longer needs all these grubby children rubbin' their hands all over his name fragments. He does not really point out where new name fragments are, but he will tell stories about the dead hosts that represent them.

ASTRO: He does do a lot of player outreach. I guess you could say he's the public relations team of the gods.

LAVANYA: Boo!

LAVANYA: The only God who needs a public relations team, if you're being perfectly honest here, is Speak-as-One. If only they would answer my calls and fully hire me for that important pre college marketing internship, in which I teach them all the ways that they can make their public face, more personable and sellable to the millennials of this age.

ASTRO: But do you have your work permit?

LAVANYA: Shut the fuck up, Astro.

LAVANYA: So, jokes aside, there's been an interesting change in perception and betrayal of Thee-I-Dare since the beginning of the game.

LAVANYA: Thee-I-Dare, in terms of personality, has shifted a lot as he's gained more fragments, and as he's become more certain of this situation in Red Acre.

LAVANYA: He used to speak of dead hosts frequently at the start, and anytime that a player character would lead him to a fragment, he would usually have a story at hand. As of recently, he's grown more and more ill at ease with this concept.

LAVANYA: He's not as interested in talking about his dead hosts, for some *reason*, and he's gone as far as to say that these stories can be depressing.

LAVANYA: In the past, he would often say to players that they need to survive - that he wants them to survive, and live through the night, and not die as so many of his hosts had died previously.

LAVANYA: Now, increasingly with certain players, he's begun changing that he no longer says survive. Now he says survive for me - a little bit of an ominous twist to everything, considered. Interestingly enough, and possibly linked in, is the fact that Thee-I-Dare is one of the few voices that is reluctant to take on every player as a host.

LAVANYA: Some, like Speak-as-One, canonly have groomed up the children of Red Acre to all serve as their host. Others like In-Her-Teeth have been wildly flailing at any player who might possibly be open to it, asking them to serve as her host. Thee-I-Dare has been more hesitant.

LAVANYA: When some player characters ask him if they can serve as host, he has actually rejected them, and has had to be convinced to take them on. Others, he has been open and willing to it.

ASTRO: It's almost like a child being picky with their food.

RAVEN: Give him the chicken tenders! He wants the chicken tenders!

LAVANYA: Oh my god.

RAVEN: Interestingly enough, due to Thee-I-Dare and Speak-as-One being polar opposites of one another, Thee-I-Dare's presence will often suppress SAO's watchers - but they can also suppress him back. I actually have a friend of mine who has a watcher in their head, and Thee-I-Dare actively has to keep them at bay in order to keep the player from being taken over by the Watchers in their sleep.

RAVEN: Initially, when Thee-I-Dare still had a voice he spoke to players in the form of dreams with a backward speech. It has improved as players have begun collecting his fragments. However, he is currently left without a voice.

RAVEN: Thee-I-Dare is one of two gods that will speak in text to players during missions. In a dream, The-Measure-Cuts says it's the only way that he is able to communicate with players after he was shattered.

[DREAM] PLAYER: If you see a white eye closing, close your eyes and listen.

[DREAM] THE-MEASURE-CUTS: This one has clearly been contacted by our fallen sibling. Your desire to share this data proves you might make an excellent host for me, however. Indeed, this is the only way he can speak while he remains... dismembered.

RAVEN: I would like to note that speaking in the text form is actually immensely painful for him, as it is not his natural way of communicating.

LAVANYA: And now with that section done, we're on to the most exciting part of tonight's episode!

LAVANYA: Now normally, here on the Dreaming Prophet, we're a bunch of old coots. We don't deal with speculation to the point that the podcast's entire purpose is to disseminate the true and real facts of the game to make it easier for players to come up there. However, tonight, things are a little different because this is a God conversation, and we do have a player, right here, ready to come up with their own speculation. So tonight we're going to set aside our petty grebe-ances with speculation and theories, and we're going to let Raven take the lead, and go stork raven mad with any theories that's a conversation she's had.

ASTRO: We wanted you here, because you know this Daimon well. As you said, you're one of his chosen. This is your opportunity to talk about whatever you want.

RAVEN: All right. One thing that I would like to touch on, because this is something that is currently happening within the community, and we're experiencing this live - is that Thee-I-Dare is currently going through a name change. Interestingly enough, a friend of mine and I helped to kind of really trigger this accidentally, by showing him a destroyed symbol.

RAVEN: And so now, all the sudden, just all these changes are happening amongst Thee-I-Dare, where he is, although sickly, he is going through this interesting metamorphosis that apparently happened to the Voices.

RAVEN: However, normally with the voices, the original Voice tends to die off when the new Voice comes into being. So, it's going to definitely be interesting to see where this goes, whether he'll be able to survive this process or not.

ASTRO: So, for players that haven't been on the up and up with the recent hubbub, can you describe what you mean by him feeling sickly?

RAVEN: Basically, the issue is when I was trying to get this information out of him, is that he wouldn't even know what he was feeling - just that he was feeling ill. I don't know exactly what that is in terms for the Voices, but basically, he just wasn't feeling right - as if, like, you know feeling, I'm just feeling off.

ASTRO: Yeah, I saw a log where he seemed to be unable to say his name - his own name.

RAVEN: Yeah, it was. It was really interesting reading that, because a detail that I think people might have overlooked is that he referred to his name - Thee-I-Dare - as his old name.

RAVEN: And so, this was kind of the first hint of him really going through this change. We have known about this for a few months now, I believe, since April. It just was very slow and nothing just drastic had occurred until now.

ASTRO: So, of course, yeah, it's kind of unnerving to see the Voice that we've come to see is so confident who has grown so much to suddenly take on unsure traits to become so one study.

RAVEN: Yeah, it's definitely scary, especially as this is the guy that I've basically followed this since first coming into The Blackout Club.

RAVEN: So, to see him in this state is just very disconcerting and worrisome.

ASTRO: All right. Is there anything else you want to talk about?

RAVEN: I was talking with a friend today about this - is that people are starting to think that perhaps Thee-I-Dare got Bells killed, whether it was inadvertent, or on purpose, or not sure, because one important thing is that the Word and the Song cannot exist in the same person. It basically instantly kills them. And so we're wondering if Thee-I-Dare was within Bells - if it's because Speak-as-One had been trying to take over at the same time something bad happens. So there is a lot of speculations with that.

LAVANYA: That's all super interesting and also a little depressing. So I'm going to end this on a high note.

RAVEN: : Yeah! Sad boy hours.

LAVANYA: It's true. Every hour is sad boy hour with Thee-I-Dar. But with that said, do you have any speculation on what his new name might be?

RAVEN: I'm kind of assuming that he's going to be going off this current trend of leaning more towards choice and individuality. I'm sure it will be something relating to that, hopefully, unless this changing process goes wrong and we get something completely different, which is definitely a possibility.

ASTRO: Here's a second question for you! If you had the opportunity to choose his new name, what would you choose?

LAVANYA: Would it be a bird pun?

RAVEN: Well, I think one time, when I was going through a rough time, Thee-I-Dare and I - but he brought up sharing a pair of wings. So, maybe like, Shares-His-Wings or something would be kind of cool?

LAVANYA: Nice!

ASTRO: All right.

LAVANYA: That would be fun! Well, thank you, Raven, for appearing on the show and brightening up our night with a little bit of Thee-I-Dare inside deets.

RAVEN: Thanks for having me.

ASTRO: And now, a word from our sponsors:

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LAVANYA: All right. And welcome back everyone. Now that we're back from that wonderful commercial break, it's time to start the next section of our show, which is - hold your applause! - an etiquette section.

ASTRO: Lavanya, your audio quality sounds much different.

LAVANYA: It's puberty. Fourteen and a half is a difficult age, especially when you're going to be : 15 in three months, and you still haven't passed basic math.

LAVANYA: So, jokes aside, the next section of the show is going to be the etiquette section.

LAVANYA: Basically, this is not us instructing you on the best possible way to host your personal tea parties, even though tea parties are great, I am told. This is instead discussing etiquette and the community specifically towards god encounters.

LAVANYA: All right! Now that that's been said, this section is not endorsed, approved of, or necessarily indicative of the developers views. They are not involved in this podcast, and all views represented are Astro and mine's, because, ultimately, it's on us players to make the community that we want to be in.

ASTRO: So, with the advent of 1.0 of the Blackout Club, voiced encounters are back, which is new and exciting to everyone that wasn't here in the beta.

LAVANYA: Including us!

ASTRO: We were not here in the beta, we both joined during the early access period. Right now, we're all adjusting to what the new normal of the Blackout Club looks like, with regards to god encounters. Not just us, the players, but the developers too.

LAVANYA: One of the most interesting things about the Blackout Club is that it is a game that tries to cover several genres at once. It kind of calls out to massively multiplayer online games, like World of Warcraft, which often have large scale events, to alternate reality games such as Marble Hornets or Everyman Hybrid, to traditional multiplayer stealth games like the ever-popular Thief.

LAVANYA: The problem is - with massively multiplayer online games, there is a large staff for each of those, sometimes getting up to hundreds of people involved in these studios, operating these events, operating these holidays, and helping with bugs, and everything else. They have specific community managers.

LAVANYA: With alternate reality games, there's usually only one or two puppet masters but the communities for those are pretty small. At their largest, the ones that I've participated in have had about a hundred, five hundred players at the most.

LAVANYA: And with multiplayer style games, like, say, Left 4 Dead 2 - which isn't quite a stealth game, but work with me here - those don't really have the sort of community where the developers are actively engaging with the audience that the way that the Blackout Club does.

LAVANYA: Question Studio does not have the massive staff that larger studios have, it has a significantly larger player base than alternate reality games have, and it involves a lot more direct interaction than your traditional multiplayer stealth games. There is no automation, which is a large part of what helps traditional stealth games work. It's literally just the developers pushing forward the story directly with the help of the players.

LAVANYA: However, Question Studio is unique in all of these. Not only the fact that combining it but in the fact it's a tiny ass studio.

ASTRO: So amidst all of this it's important to recall that the developers are human. They are limited to everything that mortal humans can do.

LAVANYA: Arguably! Technically, we do not know 100 percent for sure if the developers are or are not vampires. Their sleep schedule suggests that at least some of them may be.

LAVANYA: Like I was saying, Question Studio is a very small studio. As far as I know, Question only has about 6 people - and courtesy of our handy dandy fact checkers, we just verified that by the web site.

LAVANYA: So they are a tiny ass studios far as things go. Even for an independent studio!

LAVANYA: So with the god encounters, it's important to keep in mind, we do not know exactly how many of the developers are involved with the god encounters in terms of writing them, in terms of scripting them out, or whatever else is involved with them on the developers end of thing.

LAVANYA: What we do know is that there's only six people, and each of the god encounters can last anywhere from 10 to 40 minutes.

LAVANYA: So when each god encounter is lasting 10 to 40 minutes, and most players do prefer longer ones if they can manage it, and usually come packed with a shit ton of questions ready to throw directly at their Daimon of choice like fucking softballs, then these encounters can stretch out very quickly to take up a great deal of time.

LAVANYA: If you only have, say, five god encounters in a night, and each of those is 20 minutes long, this developer just spent over an hour doing nothing except doing these god encounters.

LAVANYA: And that's assuming that they're not taking breaks in the middle of it. If they are taking breaks, getting up, stretching their legs, making sure they don't get repetitive strain injury from typing, then something like that five god encounters could easily take like two hours. Just dedicated to engaging, and coming up - on the spur of the moment! - with new encounters with the players.

ASTRO: There are a couple web sites that show you statistics for the steam games you play. According to one of them, simply on steam, the players can peak at around 250 to 300 users every day. At 6:00 in the morning eastern time, when I checked this the first time, there were eighty four players listed as online. This isn't counting consoles, and it may not be entirely accurate.

ASTRO: If everyone four-stacked at peak time, there would be a minimum of about 75 games for any developer to sort through.

LAVANYA: So, to summarize this, here's a very limited amount of developers, but there is a fuck ton of players in the game right now, and in this community.

LAVANYA: So distributing out god encounters, especially at peak times, can end up being kind of difficult, from an outsider's point of view.

LAVANYA: We've actually had Null, in the main discourse, discuss how they decide on god encounters to a certain extent, in terms of which players get it, and which players don't.

LAVANYA: To quote him, he stated that: the system has a few metrics, but it favors new players, players who are locked onto a story thread that we want to spool out, and then randoms.

LAVANYA: At times, there have been targeted influencer encounters, because we want to make 100 percent certain the encounter is recorded and archived, but in those cases, smallish streamers get a shot too. The ratio of guaranteed public vs. private varies a lot from night to night.

LAVANYA: And a lot of activity is never reported.

LAVANYA: We have to trust that those players will tell their friends, and some will make it to social, etc..

LAVANYA: They're meant to feel very rare and always will, even as we expand operations which we will, if there is enough interest.

LAVANYA: But the bulk of our team's work goes towards making the game fun on its own. So as some player in here put it, gods are gravy.

LAVANYA: Basically, to summarize his quote, the system favors new players, it favors players who have unlocked certain story threads that they want to distribute, and then it focuses on randoms. So most people do have a shot at getting a god encounter most nights, it's just a numbers game.

LAVANYA: The thing to keep in mind here is that god encounters are not merit based.

LAVANYA: They are functionally another form of the RNG that handles Lights of Rebellion, and/or say bonus evidence spawning. You have to be at the right place, at the right time, and then you have a chance of getting it. You are never guaranteed a god encounter. God encounters are not merit based. If you play for, say, 48 hours straight - if you're constantly talking in the discord - if you draw a lot of fan art - none of those are going to make you more likely to get a god encounter.

LAVANYA: It's not merit based. It is just luck if you happen to stumble across a story thread that the developers want to spill out, and, say, if you are possibly new! :.

ASTRO: The voice of the gods that you hear in voiced encounters are not developers, they are voice actors, and they are also limited similarly. They can't speak in more than one game at a time. So, if they're in one game, that's 40 minutes they can't spend in another. They also have other gigs besides the Blackout Club, and they also need time away from work entirely.

ASTRO: Most people's family and friends don't necessarily enjoy it when someone is off pulling 48 hour shifts working, and they haven't come home, or they're spending all of their free time specifically on work.

LAVANYA: You have to get up from your desk, go outside, see the sun. Stretch your legs. Do your laundry!

LAVANYA: Developers do have to take breaks from working on the game occasionally, and doing voice encounters, and doing god encounters period in order to take care of themselves.

LAVANYA: And it's also important for the players to take care of themselves too.

LAVANYA: If you're pulling 48 hour shifts to try and get a god, for example, that's not great for you. If you're only playing the game in hopes of getting a god encounter, that's also not great for you. Building up your expectations for something that is ultimately relying on a random number generator is always a bad idea in terms of the fact you're investing a lot of time into something that may not pan out, and you cannot rely on it panning out.

ASTRO: The Blackout Club is ultimately a game. It's meant to be played and enjoyed. If you aren't enjoying it, that's a problem, but it's not an unsolvable one.

LAVANYA: It is not an unsolvable one! And it's always important to remember that, even if you do get caught in the feedback loop of playing it for this one specific thing - in this case, god encounters - when you do get that encounter, it probably will not be as satisfying as you anticipate it.

LAVANYA: When I was 18, I played World of Warcraft obsessively for about three or four months. I spent hours daily grinding up specifically for the one achievement, "Insane in the Membrane", and to get some specific pet that I can't quite remember now.

LAVANYA: As soon as I got them, I dropped playing the entire game. I have not touched it since, because I was not playing World of Warcraft because I was super into the gameplay, or because I was actually interested in the lore, or anything else. I was playing it because I wanted that one achievement. So the entire thing was pointless as soon as I got it.

LAVANYA: And as a result, the achievement ended up kind of pointless too, because I didn't even enjoy getting it. So, if you're playing Blackout Club specifically for the god encounters - which, remember, are not merit based, but they are just based essentially on random number generator and sheer luck - then that's something to keep in mind! The game should be fun in itself. It should not be frustrating. If you are getting frustrated with it, as even I have gotten frustrated with it in the past - then you get up, you take a break from it and then you can come back to it.

LAVANYA: Or you cannot come back to. If you're not enjoying it, or it's stressing you out, then you shouldn't be sinking time into it. Because games are ultimately a leisure activity. If you're not having fun and it's not relieving your stress, then what's the point of it?

ASTRO: In conclusion, like Lavanya has said, we aren't making this segment to tell you what to do. We're trying to foster the kind of community we want to be in, and we care about the people in that community. If nothing else, we hope that you'll consider this food for thought.

ASTRO: Blackout Club is made by question games. Our advertising director is Bellamy. Our transcript and video is by Lavanya. Audio editing is by me, Astro. Our guest today was Fluffy Raven. Xaviul knows how long the hundred year war was.

#the blackout club #podcasts #horror games #survival horror #horror #stealth #stealth games

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shirlleycoyle · 5 years

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The Training Commission

After the end of a second ultraviolent American civil war, after we’ve placed the state under the guidance of automated systems—well, there’s inevitably going to be a Smithsonian exhibit. Ingrid Burrington and Brendan Byrne’s brilliant new speculative fiction newsletter—which received support from the Mozilla Foundation, and which we’re thrilled to share the first installment here today—collects the dispatches of an architecture critic with personal ties to the bloody conflict who is assigned to review the museum’s new Reconciliation Wing.

The authors explain: “The Training Commission is a speculative fiction newsletter about the compromises and consequences of applying technological solutionism to collective trauma. The USA, still reeling from a civil war colloquially referred to as the Shitstorm, has adopted an algorithmic society to free the nation from the pain of governing itself.” It’s also a hell of a story. There will be six installments in all, arriving weekly—subscribe here to receive the next five direct, as they say, to your inbox. Enjoy. -the ed

From: Aoife T <[email protected]> Subject: re: This is a bad idea Date: May 11, 2038 3:49 PM EDT To: Ellen Leavitt <[email protected]>

I understand why you think that would work, Ellen, but aside from generally having no interest in putting my personal life on display like that, I really don’t think me writing a tearjerker op-ed about a traumatizing exhibition display is going to get the Smithsonian to change their minds so much as convince them that the controversy will draw crowds. I’d rather deal with them through backchannels with my mom and sister on board, try to make this all go away quietly before the museum opens.

Thanks for the Kilfe token, I just saw it come through on the ledger. I’ll be running the runnable parts of the draft in my newsletter, I guess. Sorry again to let you down on this. I might have a beat on something interesting soon–too early to say but it means I think I’ll be down in DC for at least another week.

From: Aoife T <[email protected]> Subject: Some Things Don’t Belong In A Museum Date: May 12, 2038 4:30:58 PM EDT To: [email protected]

Apologies that it’s been a while since the last one of these. I’ve been busy, not successful busy, mostly pitching pieces in my new/old specialty. You’d think a contemporary moment so focused on rebuilding America would give some kind of shit about architecture, but uhm, nope.

What follows began as a review of the new Reconciliation Wing of the Smithsonian which a Very Kind Editor cherry-picked me for. It’s good to get paid to visit my hometown because, as my regular readers know, I will otherwise avoid the District like the sweaty American bog it is. I was apparently desperate enough for work to imagine the Reconciliation Wing might not feature an intersection with my own personal history, which, of course, was deeply delusional, and I took myself out of the game in a semi-dramatic fashion. Suffice to say, currently I’m fine but couldn’t really file something this incomplete so I’m sharing what parts of it could be salvaged here.

As seen from the National Mall ferry, the finally-completed Reconciliation Wing of the Smithsonian American History Museum is a major architectural interruption in the capitol’s low-lying landscape of retrofitted and elevated 20th-century buildings–which is ironic, considering how much attention went to making it seamlessly connect to the natural systems of the Anacostia canals. The first new construction project on the Mall since the creation of the DC canal system, the Reconciliation Wing has been subject of curiosity not only as an opening move in historicizing the National Shitstorm (ahem, The Interstate Conflict) but also as a formal progression in post-Capitol architecture. (Unless, of course, you believe that the bare-chested, perpetually shouting hologram of Alex Jones in the rear sculpture garden of the Newseum cannot be topped.)

The wing’s designer, Kay Mangakāhia, was a controversial selection from the Smithsonian and Ashburn Institute’s open call for submissions. An intern at Bjarke Ingels Group at the time, Mangakāhia was notable not only for her age (at twenty-two, she was barely ten at the time the Ashburn Accords were even signed) but her permaculture-infused proposal. The mycelium buttresses and living fungal structures of the Reconciliation Wing are now in high demand, but it took Mangakāhia’s persistence and the algorithm’s faith in her design to reach this plateau. The thriving structure’s delicate complexity and environmental pragmatism reflect the oft-quoted line from Mangakāhia’s original proposal: “survival without poetics is a carceral existence.”

One can’t say such an attitude pervades the exhibits in the Reconciliation Wing. Upon entry, a flickering series of Extremely Relatable Human Faces projected on black plinths greet visitors. The visages display a fairly narrow scale of emotions between Makes You Think and Slight but Telling Emotional Pain but somehow they manage to be all very specific. No context is provided. Given the purpose of the wing, one might suspect that these are some of the IRL victims of what the museum seems to have decided we’re calling “The First Algorithmic Society.”

Only upon arriving at a small, dim aperture is context provided: the portraits are all visuals generated by AIs developed pre-Shitstorm, let loose to slither upstream into visitors’ phones. They cull contact info, pictures, bank account etc. and put together a monstermash of the type of person you’re most likely to have an empathetic reaction to, then plugged said persona into the the loop, along with the last fifty or so visitors’.

This led to the other journalists in attendance performing variations on the exhausted sigh, since recent years have seen around half a dozen gallery shows in NYC using some version of this shock tactic (though, to be fair, rarely with the technical success of the Reconciliation Wing). While this installation is no doubt supposed to primarily remind visitors of the prevailing ease with which corporations accessed our pocket technological unconsciousnesses pre-Ashburn, it also serves the dual purpose of showing how vulnerable Palantir’s National Firewall is to even ridiculously outdated tech. Hence why the feds keeps running that Don’t Bring Your Phone to China/Don’t Actually Go to China Ever awareness campaign. (It shouldn’t surprise you that Vera’s written about this. Read her shit!)

Next is a long, narrow room skirted on the left by an unbroken screen which features a 1990s techno-thriller code waterfall with, again, no context. On the right runs a series of pictures, videos and artifacts designed to shock viewers into clubsterbomb memories–the remnants of a Google bus retrofitted and weaponized into a battering ram, that famous photo of the National Guard standing down at one of the many early BLM standoffs (everyone remembers the photo, never the standoff), a yellowing final print edition of the Washington Post.

To be fair, the Smithsonian’s only getting a fraction of the archival materials collected by the Ashburn Institute as part of the truth and reconciliation process. (This controversy–the splintering of the archive and intra-federal agency squabbles over it–does not get a mention in the exhibition.) Of course they went with the most bombastic acquisitions. But for all the attempted sensory overload, the wall text and captions are jarringly milquetoast, acquiescing to the kind of both-sides-ism that heavily aided the collapse of consensus truths in the first place. I wondered what kind of exhibit might have emerged had the Smithsonian received the full archives of the Training Commission–side note, has anyone ever actually referred to it as the Ashburn Truth and Reconciliation Council For A New American Consensus outside of official documents? Even Darcy Lawson called it the TC in her fucking victory lap TED Talk last year. When the director of the Ashburn Institute has embraced a term originally coined and deployed by critics of the project it seems like it might be time to drop the formalities.

Presumably, the TC is at least acknowledged in the exhibition. Considering that it enabled UBI, closed (almost) every prison in the country, and effectively automated the office of the Presidency out of existence, it would have to be. But I didn’t get that far.

(Here endeth the non-article.)

As longtime readers already know, I write about architecture and design here, not my brother. In fact, I don’t write about him at all. I have no interest in following in Ciarnán Whelan’s investigative reporter footsteps or reflecting on what happened to him in any public setting. I’m hoping that by the time the Reconciliation Wing opens to the public, a particularly distasteful section of the exhibition will be revised or altogether removed. But to include something so graphic with so little warning, with such a manipulative experience design, and with the gall to strategically place tissue boxes around the space as though that’s an act of mercy? It’s cheap and insulting. It doesn’t deserve to be written about. So I didn’t write about it.

Thanks for subscribing (and reading). Depending on whether a piece an editor’s been sitting on for months ever lands I might have something old-new for you next week.

From: Aoife T <[email protected]> Subject: Deadtech from a Dead Guy Date: May 13, 2038 2:31:58 AM EDT To: Avi Huerta <[email protected]>

Avi,

Did you read my last stringr newsletter? I mean, probably not by now since it just went out like under twelve hours ago and you have a small excellent child. But I can’t sleep, and you’re the kind of person who might be able to help but you also probably should read that first for context. (And, as context for the context, most of what’s below is what I wrote in a fugue state before realizing that I couldn’t send it to my editor.)

So I knew the real reason I got a press pass to the Reconciliation Wing preview wasn’t my bylines so much as my real last name. The press tour minders were practically levitating with morbid curiosity when I arrived. I managed to ditch them, lingering and checking photo credits (nerd) by about halfway through the exhibit. This meant, thankfully, that there was no one around when I turned the corner into the section I had secretly hoped wouldn’t be included: the tragic death of renowned journalist Ciarnán Whelan while embedded with the Last Luddite Revolutionary Guard, declared here by the museum to be a “turning point” in the Interstate Conflict.

I mean, I was expecting some triggering bullshit, but I wasn’t expecting the audacity of how it was delivered. Instead of taking the larger-than-life screen approach with that portrait everyone loves to use of him or a slo-mo attempt to make a snuff film elegiac, I got a fucking push notification on my phone from the museum AI.

“Please be advised that the following content may be disturbing to some,” it read. It turned out that wasn’t a notice to give you a fucking choice, just a preamble before the video started to play and I was fucking thirteen years old again, staring at my palm and a video of my big dumb reporter brother using his “serious correspondent voice” I always made fun of, just outside a New Mexico Facebook data center embedded with the Ludds. People forget how long the broadcast ran before the too-good-for-a-minor-militia “DIY” quadcopter IED actually hit. (This was, of course, the video that was broadcast on Facebook Live, the one that people said Facebook tweaked the algo to downrank when their role in the attack became clear. It didn’t work. As the wall text accurately notes, most people, like me, saw it live.)

The wall displays telegraphed the rest of it, though mostly I’m just guessing from what I vaguely remember seeing spinning on the walls in front of me right before I blacked out mid-panic attack. 90% sure they have a shot of Faraday Fields under construction, which should amuse you; also seemed like they get into the conspiracy theory/ies, which probably won’t.

I woke up in a basement office of the old Smithsonian, somewhere far below the canals. A slouchy middle-aged guy with no hair on his head and a throwback 2010s beard was sitting by the door, scrolling through his phone. “Welcome back,” he said, gesturing toward an ancient percolator with the elan of a long-suffering mid-level bureaucrat. The coffee smelled about as appealing as Anacostia scumwater, but I was too tired to turn it down.

I asked if I’d been out long, a little thrown that the Smithsonian’s idea of first aid was depositing me in an office with some rando who I definitely hadn’t seen on the press tour.

“A little more than an hour. The tour’s over. If you want to see the rest of it I can take you around in a bit.” Eyes a little too steady on me, he took the smallest sip of coffee from a mug which read No Taxation Without Input/Output. “You’re a good writer. I subscribe to your Stringr.”

“No shit, thanks man. What’s your name?”

“I was surprised to hear you took this gig,” he added, “Considering.” My face must have done something because he ducked his head slightly and said, “Sorry. Just came out.”

“Nothing new. Half my subscribers are legacy leftovers. Pity’s a driving force in my economic security, if you wanna call it that.”

His face compressed into a porpoise’s little O. “That can’t be true.”

(It’s true, shut up Avi, it’s true.)

I sipped some of the coffee, letting him know via performative sigh that it was shit. “So what’s your deal, guy? You volunteer to babysit me while I’m unconscious to fanboi out here or is this like your actual job?”

Said guy did some seriously inscrutable facial muscle constrictions, which I studied as an example of how not to behave towards formerly unconscious people. Then he smiled suddenly and said, “I have to get back to work.” He raised his eyebrows, actually raised his eyebrows, and gestured at the door.

“Well,” I said, standing a little unsteadily, blowing on and sipping the rough coffee one last time. “Thanks for the hospitality, I guess.” I watched him watch my right hand replace the coffee cup. I was pissed at myself that it couldn’t stop trembling, and I was pissed at him for noticing it. “You know whoever designed that section on my brother?”

“No.”

“You know who approved it?”

He thought about that a second. “Yes.”

“Do me a favor and tell them it’s manipulative and crass? That no one fucking needs to relive that?”

He nodded once, looking down at his coffee. I left before he could put his foot in his mouth again. Outside, in a arcing, narrow corridor I turned to see the name on the door: John Temblaine Paulson.

Shockingly, my phone had already synched up with the Smithsonian’s wayfinding platform, which guided me up two separate elevators then shunted me out a service exit onto Mangakāhia’s rhizomatic terrace. I took about three steps before palming my juul out of my bag and putting it to my lips, automatically clicking the button and drawing in hard before realizing that I had clicked no button and was drawing around an object which was definitely not providing me with a long-overdue nicotine hit.

It was a USB stick. The kind you might use in, like, 2008. Dead tech, and it looked it: scarred light purple shell and a connector skewed so hard I doubted its operability.

Avi, you are well aware that I have a fairly disordered work/home/personal life, but you’ve known me long enough to know my bag is always ordered. And never have I put a USB stick in my bag. Never have I, as an adult, even used a USB stick, much less carried one on my person. So John Temblaine Paulson had, quite obviously, stuck it in there.

Recalling his idle phone-scrolling when I came to and the inscrutable creepy expressions, I concluded the guy probably filmed me passed out in his office chair as some weird sex thing, then put that video on the USB somehow and left in my bag to taunt me.

Which, as I type this, sounds kind of insane but I was also coming off a blackout induced by re-watching my brother’s livestreamed murder, so logical conclusions weren’t exactly in reach. Plus the only thing in my stomach at that point was that shit museum coffee.

As I returned to the museum entrance the elderly docent who’d processed my credentials two hours ago welcomed me with a smile that demonstrated she’d completely forgotten who I was. “Lemme tell you about the kind of people you got working here,” I spat. “John Temblaine Paulson, that weird old pervert, how could you just let him–”

“John?” said the docent.

“–scoop me up like I was a puppy or something like small and stupid and throw me over his shoulder like a sack of onions or whatever he did, maybe he used a handtruck–”

“Paulson?”

“–and just spirit me down to his little serial killer sanctum and video me while I was passed out in his shitty little Federal-ass stiff-ass chair–”

“Temblaine?”

“Yeah, don’t even try to tell me you don’t know him.”

“Of course I know him, dear. He’s in Iceland for the month.”

That set me back, my jaw going while my brain stopped, and, luckily, nothing more coming out of my mouth. The docent smiled at me like she was worried I might be about to stroke out. “There’s no one in his office then?” I mumbled.

“Oh, that should be locked,” said the docent, but she was catching up and looking all concerned. “Were you there? In Mr. Tembaline Paulson’s office? Did someone take you there?”

And here, embarrassed and out of it yet suddenly aware of my own behavior, I was saying things like I’m confused, I think, apologies, you don’t remember who I am do you? and backing out of the lobby. With the docent oozing concerned utterances in my general direction, I fled through Mangakāhia’s rhizomes and caught a ferry back to the sliver of shipping container I’d reserved on the Marion Barry Inlet (of course I didn’t tell my mom I was in town, fuck’s sake). Wrote the article, cut off the part marked HAZARD PERSONAL SHIT, sent the other chunk to Ellen, fell asleep for three hours, woke up, wrote Ellen an email saying the article was shit, and then she said no it wasn’t but yeah she couldn’t run it, and then spent the rest of the night listening to the arrhythmic thud of water against the container hull and hating myself.

I tried to clear my head this morning by heading up to Air and Space. I know, I know you fucking hate that place, but my childhood nostalgia still beats out my discomfort at imperialist propaganda. It’s one of the last places in this city where I can actually space out.

You’ll be shocked to hear this is directly related to Ciarnán taking me there routinely as a key part of Big Brother Babysitting. Specifically, the museum’s second floor, where an exposed platform lets you look down on various high points of colonialist engineering. There’s a glass partition that I’d press against, as if there was nothing between me and the immense sun-drenched lacuna beneath us, Ciarnán at the ready just in case the glass shattered under the stress of my little form.

For just a minute, fingers dragging the smudging glass, now knee-height, looking down at the overlit off-season emptiness, I felt like I just might fall, like I just might be pulled back.

When I returned to the world somewhere around the Drone Wing, my phone buzzed insistently with one of FBUS’ all-hands alerts. Automatically I obeyed and was rewarded with not-John Temblain Paulson’s face enclosed in a little blue box. “Ashburn Institute staffer found dead in Potomac.” As my eyes blurred the images and my upper back instinctively scrunched into a defensive hunch, my hand curled around the USB stick still shoved in my pocket, fingernail scouring it again and again as if that might reveal whatever was stored inside.

So: can I come visit? Whatever this guy wanted me to see was apparently important enough to fake his way into the Smithsonian, and if I hand the USB to the case workers I’ll probably never find out what’s on it. You, on the other hand, have an oracular way with the dead tech, and who knows, maybe it’ll have some fun dirt on our New Algorithmic Society we can send to a real journalist or whatever. I mean, it’s probably not real spooky ops shit. But if it is, it’ll at least be interesting, right?

The Training Commission syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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swimintothesound · 6 years

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Holiday Traditions, Metalcore Nostalgia, and Worshiping Our Own Past

Now that the holidays are upon us, it’s officially my power season. As much as I am a militant proponent of Having a Summah, Winter is a close second favorite for one reason, and that’s tradition.

Tradition is the all-encompassing, all-important, and infinitely-renewable source of holiday cheer. A celebration of our own past, and the past of our loved ones. It’s the one thing that makes this time of year truly precious and different from any other. Perhaps best of all, “tradition” is entirely unique from person to person; a double helix of reverence for our own history and memories.

Obviously, most people have traditions that they share with loved ones; picking out a Christmas tree, overeating at family dinners, watching specific seasonal movies, etc. Even the most atheistic household in the world probably has something unique that they do around this time of the year, even if it’s just going to the movie theater to avoid crowds. As great as those communal institutions are, I’ve been a staunch believer that the small, self-made traditions are as just as important as the big shared ones.

Tradition as a concept is so important to me that it was one of the first five posts I ever wrote on this site. Since I’ve already got multiple Christmas/year-end posts cooking up (and because I recognize my excitement for the holiday is offputting to some), I’ll instead use this specific write-up to focus on November.

Fueled by nothing but the endorphin rush of nostalgia and slavish devotion to the Christmas spirit, hyper-esoteric rituals begin to leak into nearly every aspect of my life by the time that Halloween is over. I watch specific episodes of TV shows, replay old video games, change the wallpapers on all of my devices, listen to old podcasts, and of course break out the winter music. In fact, one of the primary reasons for my seasonal exuberance is because I’m allowed to revisit music that’s only “acceptable” to listen to during these months.

As much as I love the gigabytes worth of Christmas music in my library, my “Winter music” playlist consists of much more than just on-brand holiday tunes. Over the years I’ve come to fully-embrace being the guy who gets into Christmas as soon as Halloween is over only because it marks the time of year that I get to break these songs out. Like I said, I’m not going to dip into holiday music on here yet. I don’t want to subject you guys to that much Christmas spirit, I’m merely trying to contain myself.

The point is that it would be a disservice to listen to these songs any time besides now, if only because it would make them less special. Obviously “Jingle Bells” would feel weird to listen to in July (and it does sound like a quirky character trait from a Noah Baumbach movie), but there’s just as much, if not more “regular” music that I relegate to the holiday season.

Case in point: the topic of this post. I tend to dip back into my high school-era metalcore around this time of year. Psychoanalyze that all you want, but I’ve now got a fiercely-cultivated playlist culling hundreds of songs from various years of angsty Christmases past. It’s a weird combination, but maybe this music provided me with some counter-programming that combatted both the warm holiday music and cold weather.

You can consider this write-up a bit of a pseudo-sequel to this post from earlier in the year about springtime metalcore. It’s weird because these two seasons are really the only time that I dip back into the genre, but man do I still have a soft spot for it. It’s mainly weird because these songs and albums now fill me with as much joy and holiday happiness as the tonally-inverse Christmas tunes.

At any rate, the same disclaimer on that earlier post applies here: I’m not necessarily proud of any of the music on this list, but it’s a concoction of albums that I find particularly potent. Records that have brought me years worth of happiness, and still have the power to collectively inspire me.

Artifex Pereo - Am I Invisible (2009)

Much like Julien Baker’s 2017 album, Am I Invisible begins with a single, eerie wooden creak. Perhaps belonging to an old floorboard or the frame of a handmade door, this haunted timbered gasp immediately gives the listener a sense of place, as if the entirety of Am I Invisible is settling into your headphones then and there. There’s a brief pause, and then the group’s vocalist Evan Redmon makes his presence known as he belts out the album’s title over a seemingly infinitely-layered vocal take. The remainder of the EP is a 25-minute sample platter that combines the best moments of Kurt Travis and Tilian Pearson-eras of Dance Gavin Dance. The album’s closing track “Neighbors” showcases the band’s already-sharp ear for songwriting, melody, and awe-inspiring emotionally-impactful build-ups. While the group only put out one more release with this early line-up, they still managed to capture something incredibly special on this early EP.

Bring Me The Horizon - Suicide Season (2008)

Back in high school, Bring Me The Horizon’s debut album, Count Your Blessings was the hardest thing I’d ever heard in my life. Filled with bangers like “Braille (For Stevie Wonder's Eyes Only)” and “(I Used To Make Out With) Medusa” multiple tracks from this album would go on to become genre-defining anthems for this era of the hardcore scene. As you could imagine, the record was an absolute revelation in 2007 and served as the first real brush with deathcore that I’d found palatable at the time. When stacked against the genre-wide impact of their debut, most fans went into the band’s sophomore album with near-impossible expectations.

Softening every aspect from vocals to instrumentation, Suicide Season represents the band’s fully-fledged pivot into a more accessible metalcore sound. While it initially fell flat for me, something kept calling me back to Suicide Season, and in 2017 it’s now my favorite album of the entire genre. Filled with immaculately-produced songs of bile and aggression, tracks like “Diamonds Aren’t Forever” have come to represent the absolute best that this scene has to offer. While the band has continued on a path toward an increasingly-accessible sound, Suicide Season is an achievement that remains an untouched peak of 2000’s metalcore.

A Bullet for Pretty Boy - Revision:Revise (2010)

Hailing from East Texas, A Bullet for Pretty Boy’s debut album is a near-perfect Woe, Is Me doppelganger. Featuring punchy driving instrumentation, tight glitchy drumming, and absolutely crushing breakdowns, every track on Revision:Revise is a pointed showcase of each band member. Guitarist Derrick Sechrist belts out catchy clean choruses, alternating vocal duties with Danon Saylor whose throat-shredding screams impress their weight upon the listener’s consciousness.

While each track is thoughtfully put-together, the album’s definitive performance comes in its final six minutes on “I Will Destroy the Wisdom of the Wise.” The track, which initially made its debut on the band’s 2008 demo, finds new life here thanks to two years of instrumental honing, and a newly-added Tyler Carter feature. It’s quite hard to oversell exactly how much I love this track, but up until last year the song had the unique distinction of my most-played song of all time, and if 200 listens isn’t a commendation then I don’t know what is.

“I Will Destroy the Wisdom of the Wise” is my single favorite song of the entire metalcore genre, my wonderful discovery, and lone takeaway after years of embedding myself in the scene. Every element of the song is immaculate, a marvel to have been captured and recorded in such a flawless state, forever encased in unchanging code. Every word is considered, the drumming is ferocious, every moment is well-placed, and the Tyler Carter feature is the vocal cherry on top of an already delicious sundae. A triumph of the genre.

Chiodos - Illuminaudio (2010)

Fronted by the inimitable Craig Owens, Chiodos was a trailblazing post-hardcore band whose 2005 sophomore album All's Well That Ends Well served as an entry point to the post-hardcore genre for millions of listeners. In late 2009 Chiodos announced their intention to carry forward as a band without Owens, publicly ousting one of the genre’s most seminal figureheads. Skeptical, cautious, and apprehensive, most fans went into the band’s following album with their guard up; how could the next guy possibly stack up? Like many other fans, I assumed I’d be over the band given the major pivot the comes with the changing of vocalists. In late October of 2010, a friend gave me an impassioned plea to give Illuminaudio a listen, and man am I glad he did. The record is a sprawling, conceptual, and voracious release that aimed high and still managed to surpass every possible expectation.

Much like his predecessor, Brandon Bolmer finds himself handling both clean and screamed vocals throughout the project, managing to reach both high-pitched Owens-esque croons and deep, soul-puncturing screams. The guitar and bass both sound full and rich, providing the perfect counterpoint to Tanner Wayne’s tightly-wound drum patterns. To put it simply, everything is on-point because the band wanted to prove their mettle now that the main star had left. Not only did Chiodos succeed, but they also created the best album in the band’s history and another one of my favorites in the metalcore genre. Owens’ eventual return in 2012 turned Illuminaudio into the unwanted black sheep of the Chiodos family, but in a way that makes this record all the more one-of-a-kind. Truly lighting in a bottle.

Crimson Armada - Guardians (2009)

With unrelenting vocals, and brutal machine gun-like instrumentation Crimson Armada’s debut album is a little rough around the edges but worth revisiting. The album’s title track “Guardian” alternates from fierce rapidly-spit screams to deep skull-crushing breakdowns. Similarly, “The Sound, The Flood, The Hour” is an absolutely punishing and ruthless track with a surprising amount of melody and musicality (once you adjust to the band’s vocals).

Dance Gavin Dance - Acceptance Speech (2013)

Far and away the most recent album on this list, Acceptance Speech released in the fall of my third year of college. While I’d largely grown out of the post-hardcore scene by 2013, Dance Gavin Dance remains the one group from the genre that I still listen to regularly. After numerous lineup changes, Acceptance Speech marked the band’s first release of its current incarnation featuring Tides of Man’s Tilian Pearson on vocals.

The album kicks off aggressively with “Jesus H. Macy,” luring long-time fans into a sense of familiarity with Jon Mess’ screamed vocals. The album is home to some of the band’s most experimental tracks like a crushing riff on “Carve,” chopped-up vocals on “Demo Team,” and the remix-ready “The Jiggler.” The album also hosts one of the strongest closers that the band has ever had on an album, making for a nice bookend of screamed Mess vocals.

While I didn’t think much of it at first, Acceptance Speech grew to be my favorite from the band. The entire record has a beautiful feeling uniformity and wholeness to it, making for one of the most pointed albums in the band’s discography. The whole thing has a wonderful haze to it, like it’s been filtered through a cold December night in the city. There are warm glowing lights, and you can practically see the steam rising off the band as they play. It was proof that Dance Gavin Dance wasn’t going to let one member stop them. I’m glad that they’ve continued with this lineup for so many fantastic releases now because this album only represented a new creative peak that the group set for themselves.

A Day To Remember - And Their Name Was Treason (2005)

A Day To Remember made a name for themselves in 2005 by embracing a unique mixture of metalcore leanings and bouncy pop-punk influences. While later albums are far more polished, fleshed-out, and nuanced, there’s something undeniably charming about the group’s debut. Every band member is still so young and green here, it’s endearing and inspiring to hear such a massively-successful and influential band in such a rough state.

Starting off aggressively with “Heartless,” the band eventually winds its way to the light with “You Should Have Killed Me When You Had the Chance” and “1958,” songs that offered glimmers of the group’s later brilliance. Even in this underdeveloped, underproduced, and underwritten state, there’s an undeniable appeal and magic at play on And Their Name Was Treason, and it’s easy to see how the band made a career out of jumping from pop-punk choruses to metalcore breakdowns. The first of many successful outings in an incredibly-fruitful career.

Dead and Divine - What Really Happened at Lover's Lane (2005)

Much like A Day To Remember’s debut album, Dead and Divine’s 2005 EP captures a band in its charming infancy. While their later full-lengths would go on to favor (and hone) a much more aggressive post-hardcore sound, What Really Happened at Lover's Lane features a softer, more careful approach to the genre. With crisp cleans and deeply-growled screams, each song explodes into brutal crescendos of original storytelling. The band’s masterful approach to the build-up is best exemplified by the album’s closing track “Goodnight, Quiet City,” an acoustic ballad that suddenly erupts into a fierce wall of grief before finishing in an orchestral swell accompanied by piercing anguished growls.

Emarosa - Emarosa (2010)

Things seemed to be trending upward for Jonny Craig in 2010, he’d rejoined Dance Gavin Dance after a two-album absence and mended fences with Emarosa in order to helm the group’s killer sophomore album. While things came off the rails quickly after its release, Emarosa’s self-titled record took every sound developed from the band’s earlier works and improved on them markedly.

This is the first time the band congealed into a fully-formed, standalone entity. While many of his other projects see Craig’s vocals taking the lion’s share of the spotlight, on this release the band figured out how to fit his singing into the instrumentation in a way that everything folds together into one presentable package. It’s a record of constant forward momentum, and one of the best uses of Craig’s incredibly-distinct vocals.

Issues - Black Diamonds (2012)

Formed after the spiteful dissolution of the groundbreaking Woe, Is Me, Issues features a nearly-identical lineup of musicians with a few welcome additions. The group’s 23-minute Black Diamonds EP officially announced the members reuniting, addressed the previous group’s turbulence, and outlined their resolution to move forward with positivity.

After addressing the extra-musical drama, the remainder of the EP is simply overflowing with unique ideas, bringing dozens of fresh elements to a genre that had become stale within the space of a few years. By infusing metalcore with electronic elements, R&B, pop, hip-hop, and much more, the group managed to create something far greater than the sum of its parts: something wholly original and different in a scene where such concepts are often rejected and deemed unmarketable.

Featuring poppy cleans by Tyler Carter and deep fight-inducing screams from Michael Bohn, Issues added some much-needed excitement to the metalcore scene, and Issues’ originality helped differentiate them not only from their previous group but also from the rest of the genre. Two years later the band had released their first full-length, and an accompanying EP that reworked 8 of the band’s songs into newly-formed acoustic tracks. These acoustic versions managed to breathe new life into these already-great songs while also serving as further proof of the band’s musical versatility. These releases represented a positive turning point in my view of the genre and definitive evidence that there’s room for growth in this industry and in life.

Secret and Whisper - Teenage Fantasy (2010)

As with any other popular music scene, bands are born, break up, and then disappear forever. Throughout the early 2000’s literally hundreds of post-hardcore groups got together, created a Myspace, released some music, and then vanished as quickly as they’d appeared. Of all the bands from this era that released music and died out, the one that I miss the most is Secret and Whisper. If anything, I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky that they worked together long enough to leave us something as heartbreakingly beautiful as Teenage Fantasy.

Probably the least “hardcore” of all the bands on this list, this would be my one recommendation to anyone reading this list who is not interested in the scene. It’s one of the most out-there and original approaches to the post-hardcore genre, and an entry I hesitated to include with the other entries on this list.

For 44 minutes Teenage Fantasy shines, glimmers, and brims over the top with fresh ideas. Simultaneously otherworldly and down-to-earth, the album is a glossy and emotional journey into the depths of frontman Charles Furney’s psyche. “Youth Cats” opens the album with a snarling guitar riff and a mythical lyric about the ‘lady of miracles’ who commands the river. Straight out of the gates Furney’s voice is volcanic, straining and stretching, brushing his upper register as the bass bounces back and forth beneath it. “Youth Cats” kicks the entire record off with an unrelenting forward momentum that gives the whole album a sense of immediacy and spectacle.

From there literally every. single. track. hits. Throughout the 44-minute running time the vocals soar, the drums hit hard, and the guitar rumbles, all of which swirl together like paint on a well-worn wooden palette, resulting in one singularly flawless record. Even the slower songs like “Upset Seventeen” have a Daniel Johnston-esque charm to them that make them more personable than nearly every other post-hardcore song you’ve ever heard. There are weird electronic diversions like “Pretty Snarl,” and even typically-boring song topics like love and death are addressed in surprisingly eloquent and thoughtful ways. Sometimes the group ventures out even further than expected, addressing topics like animal testing on “Star Blankets” and drawing parallels between serial killers and stardom on “Famous For a Century.” Everything is handled with a surprising level of tact, but also in a way that nothing sticks out as a poor fit. The entire record is unreal, cavernous, and dream-like. It impacts you once and then slowly envelops your body like warm sand. Truly unlike anything I’ve ever heard before or since. A wonderful and underappreciated masterpiece.

We’re Not Friends Anymore - You Are Television (2010)

Clocking in at a blazing 13 minutes, We’re Not Friends Anymore’s second (and final) EP finds a band that is hungry for success. The vocals explode and smolder, and the instrumentation brings a distinct groove and movement, making for surprisingly danceable tracks that spring to life. It is a breakup album, but one that seems as ready to move on as it is willing to dwell in the past. I’ve never heard anything like it, and the EP’s punctuality makes for a breezy listen that will quickly embed itself in your brain and worm its way to your heart.

This is only an abridged list of my favorites, you can listen to these albums and many others through this Spotify Playlist.

#Artifex Pereo #bring me the horizon #A Bullet for pretty Boy #Chiodos #crimson armada #dance gavin dance #a day to remember #Dead and Divine #Emarosa #issues #Secret and whisper #We're not friends anymore #metalcore #post-hardcore #music

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stompsite · 7 years

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indie bundle cruft death match volume 5: thirty game special

Okay. So. The first time I did this, I only did like 10 games. 20 felt pretty good, so I started doing that. This time, we’re gonna do 30, so that it ends on an even 100. Then we’ll go back to doing 20.

And here.

We.

Go.

EVIL GENIUS is so good that it’s in my regular rotation of games now. It’s basically a city builder, except it’s a base builder. Just scale down Tropico and you’ve got it, more or less. I really like it, but all my dudes keep getting killed and I run out of money. Trying to figure out how to get past that right now. NO, MISTER BOND, I EXPECT YOU TO LIVE.

CASTLE CRASHERS is extremely good. It’s a brawler. It’s fun. You should play it. I can’t believe I slept on it so long. SLAAAAAY.

CAYNE is an isometric adventure game from the creators of Stasis. I played the entire thing. It’s free, but it’s good enough that I recommend buying the $6.99 DLC the developers released for it, to show ‘em your support. What a great thing that was. Some of the writing was predictable--heck, the ending was obvious--but I enjoyed it nontheless. If you’re a fan of Sanitarium, play this. If you’ve never heard of Sanitarium... play Sanitarium. INCREDIBLE.

THE CAT LADY is an adventure game, I guess? I didn’t really enjoy what I played, so I gave up. ADIOS.

THE CAVE wouldn’t run at all. Black screen, no matter what I do. Shame on you, Double Fine, for releasing a game that is not fine, much less twice that. I have this game on Xbox 360 backwards compatibility somehow--probably through Games with Gold--so I’ll test it out there some other day.

CHAINSAW WARRIOR and CHAINSAW WARRIOR: LORDS OF THE NIGHT are tabletop games turned into video games. I wasn’t really into ‘em, so they’re going INTO THE DUNGEON.

As a platformer, CAVE STORY+ is not my cup of tea, and yet... I find myself enjoying it, somewhat. Enough to keep it around. WE SHALL CONTINUE.

CHAOS REBORN is a platformer/shooter thingy where you play as Anubis, the Egyptian god of death, who dies in a single hit whenever he gets shot. Not really my jam. BANISHED TO THE NETHERWORLD.

CHERRY TREE HIGH COMEDY CLUB is a visual novel where pressing the screenshot button refreshes the game. It’s got great ratings on steam, BUT I WASN’T LAUGHING.

CHOMPY CHOMP CHOMP is like Pac-Man kinda except there are four players and they’re all trying to eat the one they’re supposed to eat while avoiding the one they aren’t supposed to eat. GAME OVER.

CINDERS is a visual novel/RPG that retells the story of Cinderella. It’s got great ratings on Steam, so if this is your jam, play it. Sadly, it’s not mine. NO HAPPILY EVER AFTER HERE.

CITIES IN MOTION is by the guys who later made Cities: Skylines. It’s pretty neat. You basically manage a city transit company. I ran out of money in the tutorial. The interface is unwieldy. I like it! CHOO CHOO!

CITIZENS OF EARTH is a JRPG-style game, but you’re the Vice President of Earth. I find it charming. IT WINS THE ELECTION.

A CITY SLEEPS is a mixed-rated SHMUP from Harmonix. I had no idea it existed. Must have picked it up in a bundle? Didn’t enjoy it much. GO BACK TO SLEEP.

CLICKR is a matching game, and if you’re into that, it’s probably great. I’m not into that, so I can’t really speak to its quality. I CLICKED CLOSE.

CLONES features a kind of game design that seems familiar, but I can’t place it. Dudes keep walkin, and all you can do is alter the level so they go the way you want them to. ADIOS.

CLOSURE is a platformer where the only things that exist are the things you can see. So, uh, keep your light on. Quirky platformers and I don’t really get along, and haven’t since time immemorial. SHUT YOUR EYES.

CLOUDBUILT is a third person platforming game where I guess you’re an invisible psychic ghost of your sick and sleeping self? It felt... ‘off.’ Kinda like how Warframe feels ‘off’ after you’ve played Ninja Gaiden Black. The thing is, I like Warframe, even though it’s not Ninja Gaiden Black, so I thought I might keep Cloudbuilt around, but... ehnh. Truth is, I JUST WASN’T FEELING IT.

COBI TREASURE DELUXE is basically a match 3 game combined with tetris. It’s something I’d probably play if I had literally nothing else to play. It’s not offensively bad, it’s just not fulfilling what I get out of games. NO TREASURE HERE.

COFFIN DODGERS is Mario Kart but with old people who are trying to outrun death. DEATH CATCHES UP EVENTUALLY.

COIN CRYPT is actually kinda fun, but again, not really for me. I guess there’s a coin-themed world, and you go around spending coins you find to battle people? It’s got some kind of old console-game-that-thinks-it’s-an-rpg-but-there-is-no-roleplay thing going on. It’s neat. Just... do I really want to keep playing? ALL OUTTA QUARTERS.

COLDFIRE KEEP is a first-person game, which sounds exciting, until you realize it’s one of those grid-based dungeon crawler type games, not, like, an actual first-person real-time game. I’m not gonna lie, I don’t actually understand the appeal of this kind of game. Why not let me walk around in real time? Why navigate awkwardly on a grid? I thought people only made this game due to tech limitations, not the aesthetic, since they basically died after Doom came out, other than Grimrock. Reviews said to play Grimrock instead. Also, hey, way too verbose, game. KEEP TO YOURSELF.

COMMANDER KEEN COMPLETE PACK may be an id game, but it’s a platformer, and, like... man, it’s a genre that just does not WORK for me. I wish it did. I mean, not wish strongly enough that if a genie gave me three wishes, I’d ask the genie for the ability to enjoy platformers, but like, I feel my life would be a tiny bit better if I could enjoy platformers. I’M JUST NOT TOO KEEN ON THEM.

CONSTANT C is another platformer. Look, if you came to me wanting quality opinions on platformers, uh, don’t... do that. Don’t ask me about that. It is not something I am into. OUT LIKE A LIGHT.

CONTAINMENT: THE ZOMBIE PUZZLER should have won me over, considering it features both zombies and match puzzles, especially because of it’s cool twist where you can only eliminiate zombies by matching people around them, but the zombies can infect those people... but I dunno. Maybe I don’t like matching games unless they feature collectible Pokemon? That might explain my love of Pokemon Shuffle. These zombies, on the other hand, SHUFFLE OFF TO OBLIVION.

CORPORATE LIFESTYLE SIMULATOR is like... imagine Pikmin, but in an office, and you fight zombies, and the Pikmin elements are downplayed and nowhere near as deep as in Pikmin. Like, people follow you around the office, and they can kinda fight, I guess, but... it wasn’t deep enough to be interesting. And maybe that’s the point; the devs spent a lot more time on the player’s personal combat mechanics, and it shows. If you want to brawl with zombies, enjoy it. WHERE YOU LEAD, I CANNOT FOLLOW.

COSMO’S COSMIC ADVENTURE. I didn’t think they sell this one on Steam anymore, because I don’t think the Apogee pack is available, but hey. I googled, and apparently they do. Still, it’s a PLATFORMER.

COSMOCHORIA wouldn’t let me take a screenshot because pressing F12 opens up its Chrome web inspection interface. It’s kinda like if Mario Galaxy was a 2D game? That makes it a PLATFORMER.

COSMONAUTICA sounds like my jam: it’s a management sim where you fly a space ship around doing missions. Awesome, right? Well, the UI is a little clunky and the information is sparse, compared to a game like Caravan. Being able to manage a ship and stuff is super neat! There’s one problem: the devs abandoned it. If the game had some kind of main quest-line, and as far as I can tell, it doesn’t, I’d probably stick with it regardless. I don’t experience performance issues or anything... but it kinda puts me in mind of Banished.

I enjoyed Banished for the time I played it, but the more I played, the more I realized I wasn’t going anywhere. I was just kinda... figuring out how to optimally build a town, then doing just that. Repeatedly. I enjoy structure. The act of just flying around space, completing endless missions doesn’t appeal to me any more than building a town and surviving as long as possible does. I need more than that. Neither game is bad... but I think this is why Caravan works for me so well. It’s got a story. It’s going somewhere. I’m not just traveling between towns selling stuff. I’m on a journey. LOST IN SPACE.

COSSACKS: ART OF WAR is basically just Age of Empires 2, judging by the tutorial, which makes it the best video game I have ever played that isn’t Age of Empires 1, which most people don’t like as much as Age of Empires 2, but I do, because it is the only video game I have ever experienced nostalgia for. No, really, that economic system is virtually identical to Age of Empires. GO FORTH AND CONQUER.

It’s not like I hate the platforming genre, I just haven’t found anything in it to love recently, y’know? I enjoy Rayman’s 2D games. I like Conker’s Bad Fur Day/Live and Reloaded a lot. But the other platformers, man... so many of them, they just don’t excite me. I feel like I’ve seen everything they have to offer. There’s just “some gimmick” and a one or two button interaction with that. Sometimes you memorize button presses and repeat them before moving on.

“But, Doc, you can reduce any genre down to that.” Ehnh... I disagree. There’s a randomness to other real-time games where you don’t have to think about “when an enemy is gonna attack you” or something. There’s a lack of decision making because all you’re doing is moving between two points on a 3D plane. I don’t enjoy Pokemon Fire Red, a 2D game, for the “walking on a 2D plane” bit. I enjoy it for the monster catching/collection completion.

In platformers, that whole “moving on a 2D plane” thing IS the game. And that just doesn’t get my motor running.

Have I talked about this before? I almost feel like I have.

That’s 100 games we’ve done now. This time, we looked at 30 games, and six of them survived the culling, or 20%. This brings our total up to 78 games rejected, 22 kept. Since that’s 100 games, it’s a 78% rejection rate. Neato.

Back to 20 games per article next time!

#indiebundlecruftdeathmatch

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