Hylics: A game so weird its actually rad

I initially discovered this game through a video talking about weird indie rpgmaker games, and boy am i happy that i looked into the game after i found it. before we start, i have some links to share if you don't want to read a long text post.

ok, now with that out of the way, lets talk about Hylics. First things first, the art style. hylics is, first and foremost, a mixed media art piece. it largely is comprised of digitized clay models, 2d art, and 3d models.

its music, as far as i am aware, is handmade, and BOY is it good. as I write this, i am actually listening to it (specifically the 0-0 area). it is made of, as far as i am aware, chill jazz beats, wild guitar, some guy making awful horrible noises, and ambiance.

I feel that, if you are still paying attention, you should totally buy it right now. it's supporting an indie dev, and its only 1.67 (as of right now)

right, now, for a list of subversions.

combat is from a first person perspective

most npcs speak randomized gibberish

the "Intro" is also gibberish

everything is hard, nothing is given to you

I know this is mostly a load of pseudo-intellectual "ooH thIs GaMe SubVerTs All ThE TroPeS NoOne'S DonE ThIs " But please hear me out.

This game is rad, please check it out.

If you want more good games, check out my cool list:

Have a fine day, thank you for your time, don't die.

"Absolutely no one comes to save us but us."

Ismatu Gwendolyn, "you've been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress)", from Threadings, on Substack [ID'd]

You guys rlly don't realise how much knowledge is still not committed to the internet. I find books all the time with stuff that is impossible to find through a search engine- most people do not put their magnum opus research online for free and the more niche a skill is the less likely you are to have people who will leak those books online. (Nevermind all the books written prior to the internet that have knowledge that is not considered "relevant" enough to digitise).

Whenever people say that we r growing up with all the world's knowledge at our fingertips...it's not necessarily true. Is the amount of knowledge online potentially infinite? Yes. Is it all knowledge? No. You will be surprised at the niche things you can discover at a local archive or library.

The constant rolling disaster that is Overwatch's game development aside, what really perplexes me about how Blizzard is handling the broader franchise is their continual insistence that a canon narrative exists in spite of their equally continual refusal to tell anyone what it is.

Like, okay, the events of the games aren't canon. Fair enough: the games are multiplayer-only, and you can't account for player actions.

Oh, and the animated short films aren't canon either – they're properly understood as in-universe propaganda, not depictions of actual events. That's a little high concept for you guys, but fine.

But surely the comics are canon, right? Well, no; some of the comics (we're not telling you which ones) were canon at one point, but the writing team has decided to go in a different direction.

My dudes, what is left? The weird Source Filmmaker porn? Is that canon? Well, apparently it's at least as canon as anything else!

being a student during peak pandemic was so fucking surreal like. "it's not an excuse to fall behind" I cannot stress enough to you how much A Worldwide Plague Upending Life As We Know It is literally one of The Top Three Reasons to fall behind

"A story doesn't need a theme in order to be good" I'm only saying this once but a theme isn't some secret coded message an author weaves into a piece so that your English teacher can talk about Death or Family. A theme is a summary of an idea in the work. If the story is "Susan went grocery shopping and saw a weird bird" then it might have themes like 'birds don't belong in grocery stores' or 'nature is interesting and worth paying attention to' or 'small things can be worth hearing about.' Those could be the themes of the work. It doesn't matter if the author intended them or not, because reading is collaborative and the text gets its meaning from the reader (this is what "death of the author" means).

Every work has themes in it, and not just the ones your teachers made you read in high school. Stories that are bad or clearly not intended to have deep messages still have themes. It is inherent in being a story. All stories have themes, even if those themes are shallow, because stories are sentences connected together for the purpose of expressing ideas, and ideas are all that themes are.

I feel like those of us who are longtime Video Essay Enjoyers™ have been aware something was suss about James Summerton (I remember when Lawrence called out Somerton for stealing their Hannibal essay years ago) for a while. But I think it's cynical to reduce Hbomberguy's vid to just a "dunk" when it's more of an odyssey railing against how influencer and content culture devalues the work of culture critics, academics, and activists. As Harris said, it's not a problem exclusive to Somerton, but a corrosive attitude baked into late capitalist "content" culture. The video is a clear exploration of the consequences of all media and art being flattened into "content" creates a system where the labor of marginalised creatives and storytellers are exploited and stolen by people with more privileges and resources. As someone who has witnessed rich tiktokers quote articles and posts I've written verbatim without credit to make money from their 1000s of followers, this video hit super hard for me. From James Somerton claiming the works of dead gay activists, to Charli D'Amelio building a career from stealing dances created by Black tiktokers - plagiarism is often inseparable from discrimination and exploitation of labor rights. Harris' video is about how the nature of influencer content culture has further exacerbated the exploitative systems that already existed, wrapped up as YouTuber drama analysis. But I hope people don't miss the forest for the trees and remember you should always be citing your sources, fact checking, and be very wary of people who don't. And for the love of God, please stop getting your information exclusively from video essays, tiktoks and podcasts.

is this relatable to everyone or just me

Time to talk an unnecessary amount about floors!

Episode 6 of Dungeon Meshi was produced in collaboration with a smaller studio, Enishiya - and it went way harder than I expected, for being made up of two relatively simple and self contained stories focusing on one character each.

And you can really see how those extra resources meant the animators could give full focus to both halves of the episode. Let's take a look at one piece that stole the show.

The first half was handled primarily by episode director/storyboard artist Keita Nagahara and co-animation director Hirotoshi (or Hiroaki? [1]) Arai. It's actually kinda insane how much of this section can be attributed to these two.

But the real star of the show is the second half, Chilchuck vs the mimic, led by co-animation director Toya Ooshima in his first animation director role for TV anime!

And the biggest aspect that knocked my dang boots off was something that's very consistent with Ooshima's style: background animation!

By animating the backgrounds rather than using painted still images, Ooshima and the team of other similarly skilled animators are able to create these beautiful dynamic camera movements that wouldn't be possible otherwise. Like these cuts by Takeshi Maenami where the camera becomes an expressive part of the scene, zipping forward and backward, and tilting to emphasize the speed of this murderous hermit crab. (Maenami's style is also very recognizable here - snappy timing and quick camera movements)

Or this cut by the incredible Kaito Tomioka which cleverly combines a traditional background for the walls with a fully animated floor. The level of detail in these tiles is just completely insane, and used to great effect with this wide, diagonal angle, and the way the camera tentatively drifts forward before reversing direction, and the tiles blur out as it speeds up.

I don't think I'm the only one caught off guard by how much they full-assed this little side story, but it was a pleasant surprise!

I broke down the entire episode in this video here. A lot of research went into this one, and I think it's the best one of these videos I've made so far, so if you're at all interested in more of this type of analysis in video form, I would really appreciate it if you checked it out, or re-blogged this post! Thanks

[1] It's listed as Hirotoshi on Anime News Network, but Hiroaki on a key frame that Studio Trigger shared on Twitter, so I'm not sure which one is wrong.

absolutely enraptured rn

People who try to analyze what happened on Tumblr on November 5th, 2020, often really overstate how much it was actually “about” Supernatural. As someone who has never been in the supernatural fandom ever but dID join in on the hysterical destielposting—it was really more about the stress of the pandemic and the 2020 presidential election.

The two biggest Youtubers I’ve seen try to dissect “what happened that November 5th” in video essays both weren’t American—- and I think that explains why they both tried to explain the hysteria primarily via analyzing the Supernatural fandom/the original show, rather than through the lens of the election. And while those videos are cool, valid, informational, and make lots of really well-considered interesting points— I can tell you that me and almost all my mutuals had literally no knowledge or interest in the fact that “oh supernatural had made nods at the ship in the past but the creators were adamant that I wouldn’t be canon” or etc etc etc etc. the first time I learned about any of that context was way later, watching videos where people claimed that fandom history context (that I did not know anything about) was the actual reason for the hysteria.

But the reality is that people latched on to the Destiel stuff because it was a piece of big useless inane zero-stakes fandom news in a time when we were desperately waiting for serious high stakes election news. We were latching onto a “positive “ piece of inane stupid fandom news in a time of great stress, with all the desperation of a drowning man who latches onto whatever piece of wood will keep him afloat.

The core of the hysteria was that Americans (who make up a huge chunk of tumblr’s userbase) were currently glued to their laptops watching the live presidential election vote counts come in. These vote counts were taking an extended amount of time due to the pandemic causing high numbers of mail-in ballots, resulting in a constant state of Election Day Stress for multiple days straight.

This was also during the height of the Pandemic. People had predicted Trump’s presidency would be bad; no one had predicted it would be this apocalyptically bad. No one had predicted pandemics and lockdowns and hospitals overflowing with bodybags. remember Trump spreading Covid lies and conspiracies?? There were so many Qanon conspiracies about democrats being Satanic child traffickers who had to be put to death, and coup threats were mounting from the right wing side. It seemed like this election was a choice between ‘centrist democrat’ and “apocalyptic right wing conspiracy theory authoritarianism,” in the midst of pandemic conditions that people feared would never ever improve— and it seemed like a close election.

Another major point was that Trump voters were more likely to be antimaskers/Covid deniers, while Biden voters were more likely to take the pandemic seriously— so Biden voters were more likely to send in mail-in ballots instead of risking the in-person voting crowds, which meant their ballots would take much longer to count. And so, in many state electoral vote counts, it would initially seem like Trump was very far in the lead— only for Biden to slooooowly build up an agonizingly small lead as the mail in ballots came in, and then defeat Trump at the very end.

So you’re just watching these news sites giving live election updates, refreshing the page every 2 minutes to see if you’re going to live under a spineless centrist democrat or a literal Qanon Dictatorship. And then you go on tumblr to distract yourself, and there’s more election posting, and more agonizing over the votes, and more stress and despair—-

And then it’s been days and we’re right at the crucial tipping point where it’s anyone’s game and the next few hours will determine whether Trump will win, so you need to keep your eye on the vote count, because the next hours will determine the future of the pandemic and your country and your plans for your entire life—

And then stupid Destiel becomes canon! And it becomes canon in the silliest way possible!

If Destiel had become canon at any other time, it would have been a big goofy tumblr celebration? But we wouldn’t have gotten the insane explosion of hysterical interaction.

The entire core of it was the contrast between the inane meaningless stupidity of fandom news vs the actual stressful election news you wanted to hear! It really is best conveyed in that meme where Castiel says “I love you” and Dean indifferently responds with a piece of important election news.

It’s about the contrast between the low-stakes inanity of fandom and the massive life-destroying stakes of a terrifying election. There really was no reason it had be Supernatural specifically, except that Supernatural was a thing everyone knew basic things about from dashboard osmosis— it could’ve been any other equally huge silly fandom ship news about a ship everyone *knew of* but might not necessarily be invested in (ex. Stucky becoming canon, Johnlock becoming canon, Kirk/Spock becoming more canon somehow, etc etc etc.)

I think it’s true that people who weren’t paying agonizingly close attention to the American election news got swept up in it, and that non American Supernatural fans also were extremely excited for purely fandom reasons — but the entire reason it blew up to an unprecedented degree was because of that core of stressed out terrified Americans glued to their computers watching election results and suddenly receiving stupid fandom news instead, and deciding to just hysterically parodically hyper-celebrate this absurd useless zero-stakes news.

I think it was also all elevated by the fact that, as I said before, this happened at the crucial “tipping point” of the election where the next few hours would determine the winner. The fact that Biden began to slowly develop a lead in the hours after made it feel, hysterically, as if the hours after Destiel became canon was somehow the turning point where he began to win; so celebrating Destiel felt like celebrating that slow turn towards victory.

The tl,dr is that it’s so important to Remember the Fifth of November …..in preparation the inevitable hysteria that will happen in the presidential election on November 5th of next year. XD. Personally I’m rooting for Johnlock or Frodo/Sam to somehow become canon in the eleventh hour right before the democrats win

another cool thing is when you devour a book over the course of a handful of hours and it fucks you up and you just have to lie on the couch feeling like your brain went swimming for too long & only just came up from under the water. art is so good

Mary Oliver, from Long Life: Essays And Other Writings originally published in 2004

Anne Carson, from The Glass Essay