no-lifing a sunday morning jigsaw puzzle
For this week, I cobbled together three summers of photos taken at Coney Island. You can see those photos here.
Coming Up:
Overheard plays O+ Fest (!!!!) in Kingston, NY this Friday, October 10th. We’ll be joined by Wild Pink and NYC’s own Big Girl. Lotta homies pulling through, and you can still be one of them! Get a wristband here.
Misc. Stuff I’m Into:
Movies:
One Battle After Another [2025, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson]. Matryoshka of evil racism that gets more evil the deeper you look vs. bubbling cauldron of resistance with an infinite capacity for love and humanity. Good movie. Great movie, even. Got to see it in 70mm at the biggest IMAX theater in the country! Love you NYC.
The Silence of the Lambs [1991, dir. Jonathan Demme]. There’s always that little fear that when you’re told by everyone a film is one of the greatest films of all time, you’ll struggle to feel the same way. Not the case here, a classic for a reason, perfect picture. Chilling, excellently scored, can’t believe this guy also directed Stop Making Sense. Was also nervous about how this film handles trans people/LGBTQ issues, but the 1991 film about a man who murders women to wear their skin surprisingly makes a statement defending the validity of trans people, making it somehow less harmful for the safety of trans folk than The New York Times.
Music:
Geese - Getting Killed. Back and even weirder than they were on 3D Country. Favorite track: Husbands.
Lane 8 Fall 2025 Mixtape. That time of year again!!
Daphni - Josephine EP. His best joint since Sizzling imo. Favorite track: Sad Piano House.
Rubblebucket - Omega La La. Funky and fun, another of the spoils of constantly asking people for their top five favorite records of all time. Favorite track: Rescue Ranger.
Also really hype about the upcoming records by Danny Brown, Chat Pile, and FKA twigs, the latter releasing a companion piece to one of my favorites of the year so far, EUSEXUA.
Games:
Hades II. Bi panic simulator. Already rolled credits somehow. People asking me “how?” I don’t know. I’ll talk about this more below.
Donkey Kong: Bananza. Ohhh Banana. Hulk: Ultimate Destruction smashed so this could punch straight through solid walls.
Continuing to watch Em play through Kingdom Hearts II (we’re almost done!) and it is unbelievable how many times I have cried while thinking about a game that features this scene.
Books:
Rax King - Sloppy or: Doing It All Wrong. Love a funny and sad memoir, and this is gonna scratch that itch for certain. Thank you Andrew for using textbook manipulator tactics to choose this as my birthday gift.
Violet Spurlock - In Lieu of Solutions. Sprawling and beautiful and pinpoint personal imagery scattered throughout eight long poems. Also a birthday gift! Shoutout Lenny.
WARNING: For the very spoiler sensitive, mostly context-free images from Silksong and Hades II ahead.
Video games are usually the first thing to go. When my calendar fills up, sitting and cracking open a cold Mario is on the bottom of my list of priorities, under movies, hanging out with friends, or the all-important time I need to sit and stare at a wall. However, every once in a while a game comes along that shakes up my entire schedule, moves things around for me, presses the ‘order delivery’ button for me when I should make time to cook and the ‘cancel that plan’ button for me when I should see another human being, while I watch, helplessly. In 2023, there was The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. In 2024, there was Balatro. Enter ‘no-lifing’.
I’ve had to explain ‘no-lifing’ to a few people now, and put simply, it’s when you give up everything else for a video game. You basically spend every waking moment of free time and many waking moments of not-free time playing it until it is completely done. 100%’d, story finished, etc. A sedentary life of blissful, dopamine-abusing screentime, evoking the childhood freedom from responsibility that enabled only playing a video game after school, homework be damned. In the midst of an agoraphobic episode upon my fresh move to NYC, I finished every shrine and found every lightroot in Tears of the Kingdom in 2023. In what was a renewed life for an unused iPad, I got the Completionist (complete the collection), Completionist+ (win a Gold Stake run with every deck), and Completionist++ (win a Gold Stake run with every joker) achievements in Balatro over the past year. In August 2025, I buckled and bought myself a Switch 2 as a birthday gift, and in September 2025, Hollow Knight: Silksong and Hades II, two of the most anticipated indie game sequels ever, dropped in the same month. Hoo boy.
Hollow Knight: Silksong
COVID-19 lockdown was a wild time, stuck in my apartment and victim to infinite digital possibility. An entire December was spent in the world of Hallownest, playing the game Hollow Knight for the very first time. I wrote poems about it, I dreamt of this place, I beat The Radiance, I still reflect in horror and admiration upon the ravaged, diseased world I came to love. I had finished Hollow Knight and learned that the formerly-DLC now-a-sequel Hollow Knight: Silksong was announced, and I was so excited. Then I waited. And waited. And waited. Along with everyone else. Eventually I gave up hope that it would ever be released, and buried my hype. Almost five whole years later, when the release date was announced two weeks prior to said date, I scoffed, having developed a jaded shell over what once was hope and anticipation for Hornet’s new adventure in Pharloom. Then, I played the game.
When I shared my 100% screen that listed a playtime of 65 hours, 27 minutes, and 42 seconds beneath it, a friend asked, ‘have sixty five hours even passed since this game came out?’ Honestly, I’m not sure, because I was barely clocking the hours as they passed. It was hard to break up play sessions into reasonable chunks because every time I would open the game, one hundred little breakable walls, open ceilings, and glimmering mask shards behind closed gates would lead me into a many-hour rabbit hole where I’d look up and realize it was 2 AM and I had work the next day. Every footstep across gravel, every shard scattered and rosary bead dropped from a slain bug, every squelch and exclamation was designed with as much precision as every inch of the world, every note of the score. Pharloom was a perfect place to be, despite the mind-numbing difficulty of and infuriating runbacks to some of the bosses. It reminded me why I carve out these niches for games in the moments I do, and also why I don’t do this all that often, because it also comes with forgetting to eat, sleep, or go to the bathroom. Good thing that’s over and I can get back to cooking my meals and seeing friends! Except…
Hades II
Hades II was released a few days after I rolled the final credits on Hollow Knight: Silksong. These two series share a lot of space in my memory, seeing as Hollow Knight was the first game I turned to after finishing 2020’s Hades and needing a new space to channel my energy for exceedingly difficult and narratively rich worlds. Feels like poetry that the roles were flipped here in 2025. Hades was undoubtedly the best game released that year, even among such heavy hitters and pandemic time-voids as Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Persona 5 Royal. You played as Zagreus, an underworld prince with a tenuous relationship with his dad. Zag is a hot, witty emo surrounded by other hot emos. It’s laden with greek mythology and has an incredible Doom-with-a-lyre soundtrack. It is a game crafted by and for the recovering theater kid, and if Hades was crafted by and for the recovering theater kid, Hades II was crafted by and for the relapsed theater kid.
Yes, I’ve finished and rolled credits on Hades II as well. I’m still working on the epilogue. You play as Melinoë, Zagreus’s little sister, a witch who’s using incantations, moon hexes, and even magic skulls to try to rescue her family from the clutches of Chronos, the titan of time. Melinoë can even sing duets with Artemis under the moonlight. Definitely channeling ‘relapsed theater kid’. The supporting cast is somehow even hotter and even more emo in Hades II, including such characters as “Step-On-Me Incarnate” Nemesis, “Softboi Doom” Moros, brilliant prettyboy Apollo, and “Toxic Situationship Incarnate” Eris. The game is, in my opinion, way more difficult with an even more interesting lineup of weapons to choose from, has a more rich world in its inclusion of a descent and ascent path as opposed to Hades’ sole climb out of the underworld, and gives the player a lot more agency with how they collect and disperse resources and build themselves into demon-destroying machines.
I had told myself that Hades II would be easier than Silksong to pry myself away from seeing as it’s run-based, but that ‘one more run’ hook finds its way in deep and is really hard to escape. Every character has a motivation, people they care for, some bitch they hate, and is anywhere from a skosh to extremely horny. In a desire to see all of it, I still found myself losing sleep, eating worse, and thanking the gods for a cold that had me cancelling all my plans in the past few weeks.
So then…
All this reminds me of every time I sit down to do a jigsaw puzzle. Usually I don’t want to despite Em really enjoying them, and it’s not because I don’t also enjoy them. I just, can’t exactly do a puzzle like most people do, setting them out on a Sunday morning, casually collecting the edges into a frame and filling out the pieces bit by bit over the course of maybe a week. I sit. I sign myself up for a ruined back for the next few days by hunching over the table, not getting up to drink water or eat or pet my cats because I have to stay put until either the puzzle is done or my head collapses on the table from exhaustion, leaving me to wake up hours later, it’s a little darker outside, there are a few jigsaw pieces stuck to my forehead, and I get right back to it. I’ve found that the reason video games are usually the bottom of my priority list are not because I dislike them, but because when I like one, I like it too much. I like to get as close to 100% as possible without engaging in pure tedium, I like to see every story thread through if I can. That’s why I always wait for the right game to come along if I’m going to no-life, and I had the (mis)fortune of two excellent games that harken back to my blissful-despite-it-all lockdown days dropping within a few weeks of each other. However, now that I’ve wrapped both Silksong and Hades II, I can get back to my life, right?
Ah, shit.
-Will