September '25 Update
I got married! That's the big news of the month.
People keep asking me what's changed post-wedding. I've lived with my now-wife for four years and we've been together for six, so the day-to-day is pretty much the same, but it is a state change in a way I'm still processing. It's a lot like turning a "big age" - most of the time I don't think about it, but every now and then I am reminded of it and go "huh, guess I'm that thing now." I am in a new category, one largely artificial except for any tax benefits it may confer to us, but that still changes my self-perception and others' perception of me.
The other change is that I no longer have planning a wedding as an excuse to put off other things. It was a very good excuse and I do not think I abused it but now I've really got no defense if I don't do the stuff I said I would do once it was over. This sucks! I've got to actually figure out what I'm doing with the rest of my life.
Between the wedding and my mom's death this has not been a very productive year for me in terms of any form of creative output. I would like this to change, but the prospect of getting back on the horse after ten months off is fairly daunting. I am not planning to commit myself to an ambitious set of goals just yet - I'd like some time to figure out what I want to do, instead of falling into the old habit of doing things just because I feel like I should do something - but the general idea is to get back into consistent creative practice. I suppose this blog post is my first pass at doing so.
I'm planning on starting up a new hundred days project soon, so I'll check back in with that, but in the meantime:
Stuff I'm Reading
Culture (series), Iain M. Banks - I've been devouring these books this month. I'm on the ninth out of ten and am dreading the day I finally tap this delightful keg. None of the Culture books taken on its own is particularly groundbreaking (with the possible exception of The Player of Games): Banks isn't doing hard sci-fi or novel philosophical experiments here. Taken as a whole, however, it's a vision no one else I've read has had: an anarchist utopian future. Simply thinking about the future in optimistic terms, where the drama is happening on the fringes of a largely happy and stable galactic society, and the primary driver is boredom rather than necessity, makes for a beautiful frame to view otherwise standard sci-fi tropes through. Banks is a compelling writer and while the books are, for the most part, tragic, they're always fun to read.
It's Cozy In Here And I Hate It - I always love Luke O'Neil's Welcome to Hell World, but this set of essays hit particularly hard for me. One excellent critique of the Instagram museum paired with a shockingly affecting essay about Sex and the City.
AI-Generated Workslop Is Ruining Productivity - I try not to let my "AI is generally bad" priors affect how I read about new developments but this is pretty believable to me. Downstream productivity losses from vibe-coded or vibe-written initial work decrease net productivity.
Stuff I'm Watching
Alone (Season 12) - K and I housed this on our honeymoon. This is Alone's shortest season ever, and I think they struggled to craft compelling narratives out of such a short stay for most player, but dammit this is still the only reality show I like.
Akudama Drive - I started this, like, two years ago and finally got around to finishing it. I hadn't realized Kodaka was the writer, and it makes a lot more sense in that context (both the art and general vibes are VERY Too Kyo), but is an interesting departure from the more lighthearted (or at least darkly ironic) fare you see in his games. Worth the watch!
Stuff I'm Playing
Date Everything - I think this has finally shown me what "too committed to the bit" looks like. I love the concept and how absolutely batshit overboard they went with it (there are literally 102 objects you can date, each with their own storyline), but frankly this game just got tedious after the first few routes. Its constant winking at how silly the game is and how silly dating game tropes are didn't really help. I like games being meta but being this heavy-handed about how in on the joke you are gets old fast. And if you're this aware of how boring and repetitive some of these things can get, why would you make the player suffer through so goddamn much of it just to get to the ending? This is a fun concept that didn't need to be a 40-hour game and may well have been made significantly better by being shorter. I DNF'ed it so maybe the ending resolves all of this in a satisfying way, but I'll never know.
Unfair Flips - This, on the other hand, commits to the bit exactly the right amount. It wants to make a point about how the human brain (or at the very least the gamer brain) treats RNG and probability, and does so successfully. Was it absolutely mind-numbing to flip a coin over a thousand times to finish the game? Yes. Did I, despite both understanding the probabilities involved and being told expressly by the game what was happening, start to craft internal narratives about probability? Also yes. However, I knew the game was playing me for a fool, it made no bones about it, and I still beat it within an hour. Well done, Heather Flowers.
'Til next time.