Change is the crack through which we let life pour into ourselves. I got that phrase in a freewriting session, and it stuck in my mind for a while. I fear change because it can be bad, and at the same time the absence of change drains the life out of me. So I am cultivating excitement for change again. I am trying to force myself to act even if I don't have a complete, bulletproof plan. I don't need to plan out the entire journey before taking the first step, especially because nobody knows what the journey is.

And it is not like I can decide not to take the first step and wait for the perfect condition. Life and time drag you forward whether you wish it or not. So what's the point of refusing to move? At least I can decide the direction I would like to go. And then I may fall, hit my head, and get a scar. But at least I will have something to remember the path by, to remember the life I had.

April wasn't really a month of change, but it is one in which I put something in motion: a tiny, imperceptible atom, but it was enough to let me perceive a bit of excitement for the future.

Other than this, in April I finally completed my 007 marathon, moved on from a complex but beautiful book, and found a lot of music to be excited about. So, overall, I think it was a good month.

Housekeeping

Once again I don't have a lot of housekeeping. I was writing an article on categorizing the source of randomness in tabletop RPGs, but that got me thinking about a solo RPG I could write, so I started doing that.

That's the curse: starting a billion things without finishing a single one of them. But if I start enough, I should have something at some point. Right?

Reading

• Anathem by Neal Stephenson. A sci-fi novel set in a world similar to Earth but not quite, with inhabitants similar to humans but not quite. This is the book that stalled me last month. It is 800 pages long and quite complex in subject, plot and language. In fact, Stephenson invented words to push that feeling of something familiar but alien. For example, speely became the word for films and video, jeejah is the word for something similar to our smartphones, and the steelyard describes a concept similar to Occam's Razor. Therefore, navigating those 800 pages proved harder than expected. But the book is very fascinating, and a proper review will never fit in this article. My only complaint: the concept of the maths — semi-monastic orders secluded for 10, 100, or 1,000 years — are what drew me to the book, but they end up being marginal to the story. Or, at least, that's what I felt.

• Good Writing by Anne Lamott and Neal Allen. Lamott's Bird by Bird is one of my favorite books about writing. I was excited to see another book from her in my suggested reading. Good Writing is a collection of writing rules by Neal Allen, Anne's husband. The rules are pretty solid; nothing to blow your mind, obviously. What makes this book fun is the back-and-forth between Allen and Lamott, which reads like a constant banter between husband and wife. The audiobook is even better, as they both read their parts. They are adorable.

• Work Like a Monk by Shoukei Matsumoto. A very short book I read to break Anathem's grip on my mind. In July 2024, I read A Monk’s Guide to a Clean House & Mind by the same author. That was fun and interesting and explored a different angle of Buddhism and mindfulness. It was a lovely book. Work Like a Monk, instead, is quite bland. It is very generic and retreads a topic that has been beaten to death: mindfulness and Buddhism-derived concepts for work. If you are totally new to Buddhism, it may have some value. But for me, it is just the usual collection of shallow ideas and approaches to work.

Watchlist

This month marks the end of my 007 marathon. I am free from this sequence of terrible movies (I'm sorry, James Bond fans). But I also watched a couple of good movies.

Detour (1945)

Who said that a good film must be long? Edgar Ulmer's critically acclaimed noir Detour, at just 63 minutes, proves you don't need length. Shot in six days, full of technical mistakes, and populated by characters that look one-dimensional, it was set for disaster. Instead, these 63 minutes of guilt and tragedy have haunted the memory every viewer since 1945.

This movie doesn't need another minute. The story follows a very unfortunate man (Tom Neal), told in a classic noir way: a flashback, a drunken, overly poetic narrator, and the unforgiving Los Angeles. In a series of misadventures, he ends up picking up a venomous hitchhiker, Vera (Ann Savage), who will drag him further into tragedy.

I end by quoting a passage from Roger Ebert's review that I've found quite illuminating:

Most critics of “Detour” have taken Al’s story at face value: He was unlucky in love, he lost the good girl and was savaged by the bad girl, he was an innocent bystander who looked guilty even to himself. But the critic Andrew Britton argues a more intriguing theory in Ian Cameron’s Book of Film Noir. He emphasizes that the narration is addressed directly to us: We’re not hearing what happened, but what Al Roberts wants us to believe happened. It’s a “spurious but flattering account,” he writes, pointing out that Sue the singer hardly fits Al’s description of her, that Al is less in love than in need of her paycheck, and that his cover-up of Haskell’s death is a rationalization for an easy theft. For Britton, Al’s version illustrates Freud’s theory that traumatic experiences can be reworked into fantasies that are easier to live with.

The movie is now in Public Domain and can be watched freely directly from his Wikipedia page.

All the Rest

• Casino Royale (2006) The movie that boasts the title of Ian Fleming's first book. We had to wait this long, but it was worth the wait. Probably one of the best of the entire franchise.

• Quantum of Solace (2008) Aaaand then it sucks again. It looks like an extended post-credit scene of the first one.

• Skyfall (2012) This is not a Bond movie. Bond does none of what we expect: he is old, he is injured, he is constantly sad. It is just a generic action hero film.

• Spectre (2015) This is considered a bad movie, but to be honest, I was just happy that we finally had all the dumb Bond tropes back. It felt nostalgic.

• No Time to Die (2021) I guess it is fine.

• One of Them Days (2025) This is a fun comedy. I am unfortunately too European to understand it. Every ironic beat got replaced by my internal voice screaming "how the hell is this even a thing?"

• Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (2025) The best music biopics, especially those about artists who lived ten lives during their careers, focus on a single life episode. This is the story of Springsteen's Nebraska. It is emotional and quiet (that, btw, fits the album perfectly). I liked it, but I don't know what people not familiar with Springsteen's background and context may get out of it.

Then we also finished Season 3 of Shrinking. It is still a very nice series, but I started to feel it losing steam. It is already alienating for me because they talk in a way no other human being talks, but at least there is everything else that supports it. But if the everything else loses its power, I am left only with my bafflement.

Luckily, we got a perfectly satisfying clean series finale. Or not. There is a Season 4 coming even if I thought that the end of Season 3 was a really good point to stop.

Music

After a couple of very stale months, April awoke the excitement for music in me. Of course, you all probably know that in April we got the new album from the viral sensation Angine de Poitrine, the microtonal math-rock duo from Quebec, Canada. It is unusual to see a crazy niche genre I am fond of (microtonal math rock) gain mainstream popularity in the form of a billion streams on music platforms. The album is called Vol. II, and Fabienk is my recommendation from it.

Because everybody talked about Angine de Poitrine in the last two months, I will not add my voice to the crowd. Instead, I want to mention another pearl. As you know, music is art. But, above all, music is fun. I want to hear music that is fun to listen to and that I can see is fun to make. What is more fun than a musical project with zero commercial value and absolutely zero artistic pretense?

Cave Story: A Lyrical Walkthrough by Lee=Emcee2 is a walkthrough of the Cave Story game in the form of a rap (nerdcore) album. When I listened to (and watched) it, I had a smile from ear to ear. The production value and the composition are top-notch, and the lyrics are fire. But most importantly, it is a project that took months (if not years) and was published for free out of nothing but the love of the game and the love of music.

Isn't this a great reason for music?

Gaming

I am still playing Pokémon Pokopia. I will always play Pokopia. But during breaks, I reach for something else.

On April 21st, I got Vampire Crawlers, the successor of Vampire Survivors (the little, stupid, simple, addictive bullet-hell game that had massive success and in which I spent way too much time). Vampire Crawlers lifts everything from Vampire Survivors — setting, characters, weapons, look and feel — and repackages it into a dungeon crawler. The game loop is as tight and addictive as ever: you explore a dungeon, you collect "cards" (representing weapons, armor, items, etc.), and then you cast to create huge combos and absolute mayhem.

Each card has a mana cost and the casting mechanism rewards casting cards in mana-cost order (first a card with 0 mana cost, then one with 1, then 2, and so on). As you add to the sequence, you increase the damage multiplier. The result is less simple than it looks. It adds a good chunk of strategy. For instance, you cannot just upgrade all your cards or get only the strongest weapons (costing 3 or 4 mana) otherwise you will never draft a sequence. Instead, you want a good balance because in every hand you need a way to ramp up to 3–4 mana to maximize the destruction.

This little strategic constraint transforms a mindless time killer like Vampire Survivors (where the only strategic goal was to combine the most absurd and overpowered weapon combinations) into something more engaging.

Add to this that the graphics are higher quality, and I can honestly say that I like it more than the previous one. But we will see if this new gameplay will hold up in the long run.

Other Interesting Things

• 📝 FR#158 – What is Mastodon for? – Connected Places - An interesting article on the state of the star of the ActivityPub world. As you know, I gave up on that, but it is always nice to read something that confirms I made the right choice.

• 🎬 Why Does "Most" Acting Win All The Awards? - YouTube - A great short video essay on the power of subtle acting. Unfortunately, subtle acting doesn't get you Academy Awards, but it is much more important than you thought.

Conclusions

And therefore we are now in May, the worst damn month. But if everything I said at the beginning is true, this time I'll try my best not to make it suck.

After all, we have warm, sunny days; we can plan little trips, and we go eat at sea. There is nothing I like more than sunsets in May. I'll try to be more mindful of them.

See you next month.