May 29, 2024

SHELFDIVER: DIVE 4 - May 28, 2024

DIVE 4 - May 28, 2024

Strap on your emergency octopus, and let’s get right to it!

QUICKREADS

A quick list of links to things I read this week that might interest you:

• Information is Beautiful: Most Common PIN numbers (Related VIDEO: A discussion on TWIT of why some numbers are more commonly used than others.)

• “A Chapter a Day: Association of book reading with longevity”

• New York Times: “Inside OpenAI’s Office Library” (ungated version)

• MIT News: “Repurposed beer yeast may offer cost-effective way to remove lead from water”

GAMEPLAY

I can’t fully recommend Little Kitty, Big City yet because we’re still playing it (and loving it), but in the meantime, let’s take a dive into a bunch of games I’ve played and loved, many of which seemed to have slipped below the general radar.

The following are all links to the games. You can find all of them on Steam, but I know many are also available lots of other places, so check your favorite platform first!

• The Artful Escape / American Arcadia: I love that there are a lot of games pushing the boundaries of ‘visual novel’ beyond ‘choose your own adventure with pictures’, and these two definitely do that. There isn’t a wild amount of innovative gameplay, but both have piles of style and a fun story to work through.

  

• Her Story / Immortality: A pair of games from teams led by designer Sam Barlow that have you delving into a deep library of videos, trying to piece together the story of what really happened. In one case you’re digging though police interview footage, and in the other you’re watching clips of footage from an actresses’ three lost films. Both are so good and such great experiences that I hesitate to say more, but know that Immortality is definitely more adult in content.

• Lake: If you’re feeling overwhelmed and just need to slip into a calm and cozy little world for a bit, this game where you play a woman who returns to her hometown to deliver the mail will (ahem) deliver.

• Little Inferno: Enough cutesy and clever games—sometimes you just want to laugh while you watch things burn. Don’t say I never gave you anything (though I probably won’t give you anything more if you’re just going to burn it.)

  

• Cargo Commander: I don’t know of anyone other than me who has played this new-every-run twisty platformer in space, but it’s a ton of fun in concentrated bursts. Give it a try!

• Minit: Don’t have time to play a game? Good, because this game doesn’t have time to be played. You get 60 seconds, no more and no less, to try and have an adventure in this world harkening back to early Legends of Zelda. Of course, if you play another 60 second run (and another and another), you might start to figure out what’s going on…though you still never get more than a minute to do anything about it.

• Suzerain: Another interactive story, but this one packed with political strategy as you maneuver carefully between global powers in your leadership of a not-Eastern European country during the not-Cold War. I’ve played three times now (most recently on iOS) and had radically different outcomes each time.

• Pizza Possum: Sometimes the story of a game is in the name: You are a possum, and you want to eat pizza. You are going to run around wreaking havoc as you try to get it, sneaking snacks and escaping guards using an ever-growing bag of tricks. It’s like an arcade game that nobody rememebers, and tons of fun.

PLAYLIST

• VIDEO: Ze Frank: “An Invocation for Beginnings”: I rewatched this when launching Shelfdiver, the most recent of many, many viewings over the years.

• MUSIC: Monkeytape 2405 [Spotify]: It’s the end of May, and that means it’s time to close the books on my monthly playlist. It starts with Jimi Hendrix as a local Seattle player, arcs through the Eagles of Death Metal and the Replacements, and comes into a landing through the New Respects and Michael Kiwanuka. Give it a listen, pluck out your favorites, and add them to your own rotation!

  

• VIDEO: Rockford Speedway’s World Famous Figure 8 Trailer Race [YouTube]: 20 minutes of high-octane action racing leading to absolute mayhem and destruction.

• TV: The Diplomat [trailer; Netflix] and The Night Agent [trailer; Netflix] and The Recruit [trailer; Netflix]: Looking for the Netflix equivalent of summer thriller reading and you’ve already watched Reacher? Try these series out.

• MOVIE: Three Thousand Years of Longing [trailer]: Between Mad Max movies, director George Miller made this movie with his daughter—and though it’s not quite as gonzo in tone as the trailer makes it appear, it is still a solid fable with a lot of visual inventiveness that’s worth watching.

• VIDEO: How Concert LED Wristbands Work [YouTube]: I made some guesses before watching this video, and they were all 100% wrong. The truth is so much cleverer, and a much cooler technology.

  

• MUSIC: Chet Baker: The Italian Sessions [YouTube]: An remastered rerelease of his 1962 album Chet is Back! [Spotify]. Baker won his fame as a trumpeter and vocalist in crooner mode, but drug addiction leading to a stint in prison pulled his star from the sky by the late ‘50s. Post-release, he blazes with energy as part of an Italian sextet, with little hint of the deeper tumble that awaited him when he tried to make an American comeback in the ‘60s until he finally settled into a happier late career after a return to Europe in the 70s…and a mysterious death in Amsterdam in the 1980s, the final fall in a life that had one to go with every rise.

• TV: The Player [Tubi]: A show that was cancelled after only eight episodes, right in mid-story (see also Drive and Alcatraz), but it’s still fun to watch and available in full online.

  

• COMIC: The Monkey King: The Complete Odyssey: The legendary Chinese fable brought to live in a beautiful graphic novel that captures the perfect mix of wonder and humor that has made it a classic for five hundred years.

• BOOK: The Anthropocene Reviewed: A wonderful and thoughtful exploration of how to fall in love with the world, from the mundane details to the hidden wonders, from writer (and Vlogbrother and Crash Course creator) John Green. Read it for yourself, then plan on giving it as a gift to others.

• WEBSITE: Roll With Me: A great and quick to use shared online room for you to roll dice while playing games with friends online.

GUESTDIVE

We’ve been reading to our daughter every night since the day she was born, and piles of picture books were followed by stacks of stories as we helped her start stocking her own shelves. She’s here this week to recommend some of her favorites from the many books we’ve read over the years:

My dad reads to me at bedtime, and I like when he does that because he picks good books and does voices for all the characters. It helps me feel really cozy and my favorite nights are the ones where I fall asleep when he is reading and not when he says it’s time to stop and I say, “Nooooo! Just a few more pages!!” (Usually he reads a few more pages, because I know he likes reading tbe books as much as me.)

I have lots of favorite books, but these are the best ones we’ve read at bedtime. I think you should read them too.

• Discworld: We are reading these now at bedtime. There are more than forty of them! We’ve read 11 so far. They’re lots of fun! They’re fantasy stories, and scary sometimes but not too scary. They have really good characters, like the girl witch Tiffany Aching and Captain Carrot (who is a dwarf but not really) and DEATH. My favorites so far are:

  • Wee Free Men, because The Nac Mac Feegles are funny and it’s the beginning of the Tiffany Aching stories, which I like a lot.

  • Guards! Guards! has a lot of fun characters and you get to see Ankh-Morpork which is a place where fun and interesting things happen all the time. This is where Captain Carrot joins the City Watch and the Watch starts to grow and remember how to actually do their jobs (because they weren’t before) which is good because a dragon is coming to try and cause trouble.

  • Mort, where a boy gets a job helping Death and you get to learn a lot of secrets about him like about his adopted daughter. Death shows up in all the Discworld books but you get to see a lot about him and his house and his family in Mort, which is interesting and also funny because all the Discworld books are funny sometimes (but also sad but almost always really good.)

• The Great Big Enormous Book of Tashi: We read this book about a hundred times when I was very little. It has lots and lots of stories in it that were in smaller books but they’re all together here. They’re all stories Tashi tells to his friend Jack about his amazing adventures in his funny far off home country where all kinds of magical things happen like in fairy tales. My favorite is where Tashi sneaks into a house owned by a witch named Baba Yaga.

  

• The Hobbit: There’s also The Lord of the Rings, but we haven’t read all of those yet. This is the first one that JRR (not Junior!) Tolkien put out and it is the one where Bilbo pretends to be a thief so he can go on an adventure with a bunch of dwarves who want to steal their treasure back from a dragon named Smash. Gandalf is in it too and it is very sad when he (SPOILER!) dies fighting a monster down in the dark caves underground. Also when they are in the dark is when Bilbo wins a riddle contest against Golllum and wins the ring that causes all the problems in the Lord of the Rings, so you might want to read this one if you want to know more about that. [Ed: Yes, I know she’s mixing plots together, but I promised her not to change her words much.]

• The Princess Bride: A book about a girl named Buttercup who lived on a farm with a boy named Farm Boy who gets kidnapped while she’s on a horse ride but gets rescued by the Dread Pirate Roberts who is actually the Farm Boy but his real name is Wesley and they go on an epic adventure which includes many tricks like one with a poisoned wineglass. It has a really good story and I like that it has more details in it than the movie and parts of the story like the Zoo of Death that aren’t in the movie version. I almost said The Neverending Story because that’s really good too (the book is way better than the movie!!), and though I like Princess Bride a little bit better I’m still going to sneak it onto the list here.

BONUS! My dad does fun voices when he reads the books to me so I can hear what all the different characters sound like. You can’t hear that unless you come over for a sleepover and he reads to all of us before bedtime, but here are my favorites of his story voices:

• Sam Vimes: He’s one of the Guards from the Discworld books. He’s grumpy and grumbly but he is also a good person and a good leader. Dad’s voice for the Guard Nobby is also really funny because Nobby is pretty silly and funny.

• Charlotte and Templeton: We’ve read Charlotte’s Web more than one time and my dad will still read it to me when I’m feeling sick or grumpy. Charlotte’s voice is very caring and loving and makes me feel happy and sleepy, but Templeton the rat has a really funny grimy voice because he ’s a rat and kind of selfish.

• Ron Weasley: My dad did a really funny thing where you could hear Ron’s voice changing as he got older as we read more of the books.

• The Nac Mac Feegles: Kind of like how they all look alike they all have the same accent, but they are also all their own Feegles so my dad gives them all their own voice kind of so you can tell Rob Anybody from Big Yan from Daft Wullie from Not So Big as Medium Jock but Bigger than Little Jock Jock!

• DEATH: My dad uses his water bottle to make his voice for Death sound really deep and strange and it always surprises me because he’s reading to me in the dark. (I put his name in ALL CAPS because when he talks in the Discworld books, that’s how they type all his speeches.)

BACK TO THE SURFACE

Thank you for the pleasure and privilege of your attention, friends. I hope Shelfdiver gives you something to fill your time, eyes, and ears. And maybe your heart, but the cheese is probably doing a good job of that already.

Speaking of food, I think next week we’re going to hew in that direction…

QUOTEBOOK

“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all those words and sentences that in all your reading have been to you like blasts of a trumpet out of Shakespeare, Seneca, Moses, John and Paul.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

I don’t just collect things on shelves. The text file with my personal collection of quotes runs over a hundred pages, so I’ll close each of these emails by sharing a few of those quotes with you. Like I’ve done over the years, you can sift, save, and jettison as your mind and heart feel fit. See you next week!

Art, be it poetry, music, sculpture, puppetry—the whole of it, inspires change on a personal level rather than a global one. This is important because the individual is the whole. The creation of art argues that people are connected, ideas are connected, the past and future are connected by this moment.”

– Jamaal May

"Failure is your friend. Winning is your goal, or losing is your goal. You never want to land in that sad middle ground where you haven’t failed. Where you did nothing to embarrass yourself, but didn’t do anything to distinguish yourself either. That’s the difference between winning and playing not to lose."

— Chris Gethard

“We cannot survive this next phase of human history without beauty and wonder. So go out in search of it. Make it with your hands. Let all that is practical be filled with gift and delight. … Don’t be afraid to be obsessed with creation or squander time away on the smallest details.”

– Lydia Wylie-Kellerman

"Be proud of what you do. Do the best you can. Be honest. Tell people you love them. Work as hard as you possibly can toward your goal, and even if it doesn't turn out to be your ultimate destination that hard work and honesty will pay off for you or other people you know, and that dedication will pay dividends as you take care of each other. Together, you might even end up somewhere better than you had hoped and planned."

– Bob McGrath