Sometimes all you got is play
This one is about finding ways to keep something fresh when familiarity makes it thin.
I'm playing Fallout: New Vegas again. Because of course I am. We all have our things we pick up, their familiar edges soothing like a worry stone or a favourite chair. I joke a lot about being an existential optimist. That, it's not an existential crisis--it's an existential opportunity. It's a weird time to a hopeful, angry person. To have a filled-up punchcard of personal variables that get you one free "fascists hate that you exist." And yet!
My whole thing with these newsletters is gentle rumination. Let's all be herbivores having a nice time in a field, digesting things together. Let's all not think about the full process of how ruminants work because it is very cool to me but also I think could make the metaphor a little gross and a lot labyrinthine. What I'm going to do here is assume you also live in the world and are also online. That you know about things like Crips for eSims for Gaza, the Queer Liberation Library, Cispes, and innumerable other ways to help and strengthen communities and yourself.
It's beautiful and terrible that life does keep rolling along. I've gone to work in the spreadsheet mines with the only interruption in the classic work calendar over the past seven years being when the LA fires this January took out both electricity and cell service. Anyway. We stay silly. And I keep playing Fallout: New Vegas.
I haven't done playthroughs quite this close together before. It's dangerous, a little. You know how when you have a commute you have done for a long time, you could do it in your sleep? I've done that. I had a walking commute to this sandwich shop. A specific route from the dorms through some back streets, cross a field, then we get to stoplights etc. and finally the shop. And, you know how student sleep schedules are. So, one day I left the dorm and started my path and then just, woke. up. as I was crossing the field. No lie. I'd motored myself over half my commute while my whole thought system was on pause.
There was a teacher at my high school who was a swimmer, and he told us once that he'd done laps for so much of his life he would doze off while doing his morning workout. Which is wild. The body does keep going on its own sometimes, doesn't it. With games--especially ones you've explored every corner of, exhausted the dialogue trees, printed lists to check off--with games you can lose the fun. You're just pushing through, you know what comes next, you've always known what they'll say, where the monster is, how the twist unfurls.
Image description: Screenshot of Tumblr post by molabuddy: the insane experience of missing a fictional character . like you can always go back and reread the book , replay the game , rewatch the show or movie , you can always go back & see them , but you can never experience them & their story for the first time again . its absurd to miss them because they'll always be there , but you'll miss when there were still new things for them to say . for a small time they were real & growing and changing and you hung onto every new word, but now all they can do is repeat the same story forever&ever & they're not real anymore because you know everything they're going to do. & you miss them. its fucked man... In a reblog: in this way fanworks are like necromancy. End ID.
This post is a mood. You gotta put some space between, somehow. So you're surprised again, so you can feel familiarity and freshness together. The once-soothing sweetness of a favourite thing gone flat is a kind of hell. There's something awfully existential about it, you remember when it was Good and are actively experiencing it being Not Good. Ah, what's that? The call for my silly constant phrase, "existential opportunity?"
For me this time, knowing I was going back to something I know very well in a very recent way, I actually did All The Things. I'm playing a very different character than I ever play (high intelligence! good at talking their way out of things!), which is enough to shift "what would they do?" when presented with quest order of operations, or story priorities. I got (and made) some supplementary reference to give me a fresh dimension and uncover bits I had previously missed.
I've mentioned using this game as a carrot before, and it's the most efficient one I've found. I absolutely have tried this with other games (from the same studio, with similar vibes!) and it just doesn't work the same. It's very weird. Anyway, before I could start this playthrough, I had to finish a short story I'd been working on for an amount of time I won't share. But I finished it--and this playthrough is, ostensibly, research for a story I'm writing as a my best friend's (late) birthday present.
Did you know, if someone has been in your life for long enough, you can just tell them what you want them to give you for gift-giving occasions and everybody is happy with the outcome? We're playing dolls, more than me writing her a story, and he knew when asking for this that I was being dangled some particular themes and formats that I'm a sucker for.
So, that's a way to keep things fresh, bringing a pal into it and remembering to play and pretend. And I'll hold it works for more than just games.
How about some books! Links go to the Storygraph entries for each title, a great place to check out content warnings and find ways to read them.
- Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin was the book that the college I went to mailed me as part of the freshman packet, for reading over summer. It was the better of the various books that went out to the different freshman groups, in my opinion. My copy is marked up for dissection and discussion and I've successfully bullied my both my partner and my best friend into reading it recently for the first time. "It's a light book! It's fun and weird," I said--mostly in comparison to The Dispossessed. My best friend later was said "[you] called this fun and silly?? This is so intense and difficult!!!!" and then I remembered who you are hahahaha." So, you know. Drop of salt to my impression there. It is difficult and intense! But there's hope there!! I think of this book a lot.
- How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying: Dark Lord Davi #1 by Django Wexler is actually fun, though there's a good bit of existential darkness too. Rarely can someone pull off a genuinely enjoyable flippant narrator but that's the key point of the whole... thing with this book. Think time loops and genre-awareness, but also there's a person under all that sass. This was recommended to me by a friend, and they were right to do so.
Some pictures, two of which are from the same place and day and one which is quite not.
Image description: A photograph taken in golden hour, the setting sun lighting up spitty drops of rain falling on dandelions sharp in the foreground. Past them there is a clumpy, weed-strewn bit of ground off a house, a sun-rimmed silhouette of a person blurry in the back. End ID.
Image description: A photograph of yucca blooms in three stages of growth: the lovely white-blossomed, twigs bestrewn with pods, and just dried sticks. The bright sun has washed all the colours, including the sky, thin. End ID.
Image description: A photograph taken as the setting sun backlights the little fuzzy pods on a tree that is bedecked in whitish lichen, the dense mass of branches turning the brightness of the sun into a little star. End ID.
Now, for some cool links.
- E-COM: The $40 million USPS project to send email on paper over at the Buttondown blog captured my interest immediately. What a wild thing!! I wish it still existed in a way!!
- Maybe 10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days by Samantha Mills, over at Uncanny, is a little on the nose for the vibe of this newsletter, but also: it's good.
- If you already saw Preserving the USC Optical Sound Effects Library on a blogpost of mine, sorry/not sorry. Very cool explanation of optical sound effects, how sound was recorded for movies in the 1930s-50s, and a very cool blog overall.
- Speaking of optical, lol, The Peculiar Manicule is a very rad archive of 1960s and '70s graphic design. The trippy, bright, swoopy and weird, all delightfully browsable.
If you've thought of donating eSims, this guide was very helpful, and Crips for eSims for Gaza is a good option if you can't easily manage topping them up. There are also more traditional donation targets like the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, UNRWA, and Doctors Without Borders. If you prefer giving directly to families, Gaza Funds is a nice resource that facilitates finding campaigns.