lend me ur eyes 093
“Good old times... Remember Instagram where you could post an image?
What? Address bar? Website? You could type? Was there a sort of typewriter?
LISTENING
Five albums I have liked recently, all a little different. The first is I Heard That Noise by quickly, quickly. This is a singer-songwriter thing that I’ve been enjoying, partly for how it brings moments of sonic abrasiveness, often only momentarily, to extremely familiar sounding, pleasantly folksy songs. That combination always does something for me: soothing, but with a little friction. Also on the very pleasant end of the spectrum is Wilson Tanner’s Legends, recorded on a vineyard in Southern Australia and described by the liner notes as “a wine-soaked agricultural fantasy.” Mixing “wind, brass, balalaika, balloon, pipe and synth” the soundscape of this album is nothing too revolutionary, but it's very appealing. It has some really good melodies that satisfyingly stick in the ear, and, as long as there is a little bit of surprise present somewhere, enjoyable is often enough, nowadays at least. Accordingly, the album I have listened to most to this year is probably caroline 2, by caroline. It is the sort of guitar music band thing that hasn’t interested me for many years, but for whatever reason, age or palette, is really appealing now. It is 1997 again, it is 2007 again. It’s a nice headphone album to walk around to; the songs are short, catchy, and provide a good feeling. One album that took me by surprise was Spiritual Sound, by a band called Agriculture. It’s a genre-mixing project, switching regularly from atmospheric black metal moodiness, to something closer to emo-screamo, to straighter hardcore, veering in between into more ambient or even folky spaces in between. It’s really captivating throughout, so much so that I would probably recommend it to anyone who doesn’t really gel with any of these genres, providing they can tolerate quite a bit of shouting and screaming and generally making a fuss in their music. Lastly, Joanne Robertson’s new album Blurrr is just very good, if also nothing too unexpected for anyone familiar with the sort of music she has been making. It is more of an evolution than anything territory shifting. But that’s very much okay. I like the album description for it: “Blurrr was written in between painting sessions and also whilst raising a child.”
PLAYING
After bouncing through a few short independent games (CARIMARA, and Roger, Many Nights a Whisper, Metal Garden, despelote) that all have definite merits but didn’t quite astound me, for differing reasons with each, I have landed upon what I would deem to be the video game of the year: Baby Steps. It is made by Bennett Foddy, who designed QWOP and Getting Over It before this, and by Gabe Cuzzillo, who made Ape Out. It is a game about frustration and accomplishment, and a game about game conventions and game design. You play a 35-year-old “failson” who is thrown into a large open world landscape in his onesie, and, as him, you have to walk through this landscape towards some undefined summit or goal. To walk, you must control and place each leg independently, one after the other, forwards and upwards and over unstable and shifting terrains. Walking is very difficult, and, if that were not enough, the landscape is treacherous too. You fall often, and it is very funny to do so. And you fail often, and in varied ways. This is a game about masculinity, and you play a man so inept and frustrated that he can barely even walk. As you eventually walk successfully, you encounter characters who question, mock, and challenge you, encountering them in improvised cutscenes voiced by the game’s developers themselves. As the player, you start by feeling frustrated at your pathetic avatar, but after many hours struggling to operate him, you become appreciative of his struggles and you empathise more with his plight living in a world he was not made for and that had broken his spirit, just as the one he has now been thrown into is continuing to do. This character is not the traditional game protagonist, but instead the antithesis of the sort of hero character who normally inhabits a video game world. And the game, despite resembling one on some level, is not a standard high budget open world game but its inversion, a satire of the genre and the medium in the form of an exploration based game that both punishes and rewards your desire to explore. You climb most of a mountain, slip on a muddy crevice near its peak, and then slide all the way down to the bottom, forced to begin to ascend again, now debased and stained. Multiple times, I played the game for an hour, crossing forests, scrambling through streams, sliding around an insurmountable hillside, only to realise I had circled back round to where I had started, with nothing but walking to show for my investment of time. There is a good Guardian article that describes well the experience of exasperation that is an instrumental part of the experience of the game. The game is laughing at me, and yet, for some reason, I keep playing it, partly for the palpable feeling of satisfaction that my slow, tortured progression invokes but partly for the sense that it really does have something to say. It is making me laugh. It is making me suffer. It’s almost certainly a total waste of my time. And yet, it also feels like a genuinely meaningful exploration of what it is to be person who plays video games, who is interested in the feedback loops that they offer, the weird push and pulls of gameplay, the strange conventions and expectations and the pleasures of seeing them defied and ridiculed. I have played Baby Steps for more than ten hours and I am stuck in the terrible sand dune area, a section of a surprisingly large game that it seems to have taken others only around two hours to reach. And I will probably continue trying to operate this stupid man’s legs until I can tolerate doing so no more. One leg in front the other. Thinking and also trying not to. Trying to work out what it all means.
lend me ur eyes is a linkdump of what i'm into month by month: music, books, games, movies, and other internet detritus, with misc editorial misgivings in the intro. lend me ur eyes friends, so that i can see.