like last time I was in between posts about actual ideas, a grab bag of books I didn't have tons of thoughts about. or have tons of thoughts about yet. or many thoughts but I’m not that far. or not even books. ok I’m just going to start.
let men die off already
Described by the publisher as “the first English language publication of the work of Izumi Suzuki, a legend of Japanese science fiction and a countercultural icon” and described by the Discord server I got the recommendation from as “depressing”, I’ve been reading the short story collection Terminal Boredom.
The first one is a hell of a highlight. A world in which men start dying off and are kept in quarantine while the world turns into a queer matriarchal utopia. A young woman is curious about men, as are all women, but also distrustful of the carefully curated government narrative on what men are and were. It stands out in contrast to a book I started and didn’t finish last year, Manhunt, about a world where testosterone turns people into zombies, and TERFs roam the post-apocalypse hunting down trans women. I bounced off Manhunt partly because I wasn’t clicking with the audiobook, but partly because it was perhaps too blunt? Too obvious? Too lacking in a certain willingness to trust the reader to explore the subtext, which the first short story of Terminal Boredom nails, despite having necessarily dry, expositiony prose. I intend to give Manhunt a second shot soon, having borrowed my sister’s copy of the book, but now I feel like I’m going back in with higher expectations because of what this short story was able to do. The official ReadOnly stance on spoilers is that spoilers aren’t real but also idk I’m not just gonna tell you the ending of a short story that I’m not even gonna Analyze. That doesn’t feel sporting.
UNICORN OVERLORD DRIP GOTY 2024???????
What is drip? How does one recognize style? What balance between purpose and– fuck it, the game is called fucking Unicorn Overlord and it has drip. But its characters maybe… do not.
The demo dropped last week and I streamed it for ~2 hours. Honestly, had a blast. The story seems goofy but not taking itself too goofily in a way that really befits a game which honest to goodness has been named Unicorn Overlord. You probably have questions!
Is there a unicorn?
Not yet! Just, like, statues of unicorns.
Are there going to be unicorns?
No idea.
Do they… worship unicorns?
Maybe! I think so? One person was praying to a unicorn statue I think, and the main character got a magic heirloom that’s called the ring of the unicorn and it has the power to unbrainwash people who are under the control of evil magic.
So does that make him the unicorn overlord, or is there a unicorn who is an overlord and that is who he draws his power from?
No idea.
I see this is a Vanillaware game. Is it vaguely self-aware of doing anime bullshit.
Well, it’s got the anime bullshit. Remains to be seen if they’ll… do something with that. Artistically. I’ll just put this gif here and you’ll know what the stakes are.
True story: I had a roommate once who watched me playing Nier Automata for a bit, said that 2B was too hot to be a robot, and left the room, just dangling mysterious made-up criteria in the air like that.
Listening to an Author Whose Work I’ve Never Read’s Book About Writing
I got the audiobook for Haruki Murakami’s Novelist as a Vocation from the library after a Discord server I’m in was trying to define drip (that’s right baby there’s a throughline in this post) and noted that Murakami’s definition of originality wasn’t dissimilar. Which I’m not going to write about. Rather I thought the angle of “novelist as a vocation” was pretty interesting; sitting in some kind of sweet non–self-help spot between being a book about writing books (which I always bounce off of because every book about how to be better at writing just sounds like “have you tried writing more because you really truly just have to write more that’s it” to me) and a book about making money writing books (which I always bounce off of because I like to pretend capitalism isn’t there if I don’t look directly at it). But “vocation”, however? How wistful. Now that is perspective I can trust. I want someone to tell me about writing from all angles of sustaining your life, man.
Although mostly what’s coming back to me about what I’ve heard so far is Murakami talking about how he used to run a jazz club and that sounded really nice.
I Am Approximately 2% Into Red Dead Redemption 2
On the one hand, I like the idea of a slow, tedious game. I don’t know what this game is about yet. It throws so many mechanics and button presses to memorize at you, I instantly felt like I was in the most cumbersome video game I’ve ever played, and like it kind of does that intentionally but also kind of fumbled it, and this all happens in maybe one of the most visually stunning photorealistic video games I’ve ever played, and all my thoughts are “holy shit, look at this snow” and “holy shit, the camera angles on cinematic mode, you can just turn this on and off” and “holy shit, no one in this story is interesting yet”. A technical marvel, for what?
My favorite story part so far is on an early, tutorial-adjacent mission where a man in your party takes you hunting for deer. You ride your horses, you slowly track deer, you get a bow and arrow, and you both chat a bit about how you ended up here. It reminded me of my somewhat odd favorite part of The Last of Us Part II – another game with greater artistic ambitions than it could quite manage – a flashback where your surrogate father’s brother takes you on patrol and teaches you how to use a sniper to clear out some zombies. They’re far enough away they don’t post any threat, really, to the player anyway. It’s a weirdly cozy moment where the high stress of the game is set to the side and you just get a scene where someone who cares about someone else shows them how to do something successfully and tries to have a bit of a heart-to-heart with them about something that happened between them and a mutual connection of theirs unsuccessfully, in the beautiful mountains, performing the mundanity of survival.
I have no idea who the people in this game are yet. I can appreciate how daringly slow it is, but I’d appreciate it more if anyone I was vibing with was compelling.
What If Everyone I Was Vibing With Was Compelling
fuck me i think i have to buy a fucking playstation 5 this week just for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth i want an iv drip of all those guys in my veins