on the theft of rare books by gregory priore and john schulman

Cw: discussion of suicidality and joe exotic

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/20/us/Carnegie-library-theft-schulman-priore.html Essentially: Gregory Priore managed the rare book room for the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. Over many years he raided the rare books and fenced them to John Schulman, a local books dealer. 

 The theft was abysmally stupid. Neither the thief nor the fence decided to think about what would happen when the vault was checked. They both relegated themselves to discovery, eventually, and instead just enjoyed the extra income while it lasted.

This reminds me of times I've heard of gambling addicts embezzling entire businesses. Tho Gregory and John's actions weren't attributed to addiction. But there is that same decision to not think, to not hide, to just trade the future for the present, as in such an addict. 

Both of these men came into their jobs everyday for years and either knew they were fucked or suppressed the knowledge that they were fucked.

Greg priore said greed led him. I wonder if it wasn't a specific kind of lust for the books. Valuables .

Treasure.

(Greg and John)

(Joe Exotic of "Tiger King" fame)

treasure = genes = beauty

Joe Exotic was able to bargain the thrill of exotic animals for income. 

These men help us understand something about ourselves, because they show us tales of greed.

Everything that we love is, in an essential way, as base as the greed Greg faced or the brutality Joe showed to people and animals alike. 

Too much desire negates the self... Desire is suicidal, desire is the desire for change, the desire to want something different. These men were essentially not at peace.

Greg, John, Joe-- all Willy Loman's, a-toil, stewing, family men... Can't blame me for relating.

(Fredric March playing Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman)

I'm more like Joe than Greg in my family structure. I live in a pod of young adults. It's nice, I'm lucky. I feel a sense of disquiet.

Travis was one of Joe Exotic's husbands, and he was abused by Joe. Travis accidentally ended his life in a bizarre gun incident. I relate to Travis's ennui. I smoke a lot of weed. I don't intend to hurt myself and I'm not liable to point firearms at myself and at my friends for fun, so I do not think I will meet an end as sudden and stupid. (Nor any kind of end anytime soon God forbid !)

I think Travis loved guns and the sense of power they gave him even as he was trapped in a cult of another man's personality. Note the zoo uniform. 

Perhaps, as Greg Priore donned his uniform (collared shirt, vest, glasses)... A Willy Loman, he also desired the sense of control destruction can give you. Theft, treasure, tigers, family, weed, guns. All can be said to be powers of death (change).

Good ol' Skeleton Farmer.

Death is the harbringer of change. I am blessed to realize that human consciousness cannot be prolonged forever. Someday, the burden will be lifted-- everything must end. 

No hell can outlast death. The toil of years of knowing you'll eventually be caught, get your career ruined, and be imprisoned-- change will end that toil. 

Alternatively, maybe the weight of knowing you were going to be fucked somehow didn't bother Greg and John. Joe, I know, has gravitas. Maybe the book thieves just 'blanked" it.

In any case, guilt or no, their futures were traded away. 

A review of 120 Days of Sodom: Honey Boy, Love and Mercy, Succession, Nxivm, Hannibal, The Office, and Familial Concentration

 

Keith Raniere, Cult Leader of "Nxivm"

Yes, we're vulnerable. Reporter Barry Meier said the Nxivm story stuck out because it showed how people are always vulnerable. I think the extent to which we end up in situations like Nxivm or Jonestown speaks to our existential fuckedness. It's a family matter, I think.

In "Honey Boy"(2019), Shia Le Bouf plays an abusive father figure raising a child actor, the story being Shia's childhood biography.  Remarkable in the film, I think is a discussion of where the power lies in a father/child relationship, as the child actor wields a "per diem" (an envelope stuffed with cash the kid earned, which the dad wants for strip clubs) and technically employs the abusive father, a technicality which becomes more significant as the child ages.

"Love and Mercy" (2014) had a similar treatment: a therapist harangues and abuses a multi-millionaire depressive artist, who has slid into the therapist's legal clutches. These kinds of situations are not unknown for rich people. 

There is a kind of diffusive, tentative chaos among the rich, if HBO's Succession is as real as it feels. A young distant cousin of a powerful mogul manages to step into the mogul's family, half by accident, and half by dumb resilience. 

Consider what it feels like to move from one conception of power into another. We are always able to wield the valued props of our power's position. These props, wielded by Keith Raniere for example, don't amount to much. A childhood of awards. Some real skill, like martial arts, or volleyball. A degree and years of education.

Yes, they make you into better people: successes. Keith Raniere I think has many successes. But these achievements are fundamentally empty to the extent that they do not guarantee much about the people or the situations these empowered people are in and draw people into.  

Jonestown's communist bona-fides* are another example: not enough to guarantee much. The lives we lead are the proof of their roots; changing the way people live was Keith Raniere's oestensible goal. 

Which is absurd, and what is sad, is the over promise // under-delivering of these cults. Overpromise on bona-fides, under-deliver on results. At least, long-term results. Obscure the meaning. I'm reading 120 Days of Sodom; there's no expression of rich people, dominance, and wealth which is truly significant. Which is why Keith's branding scheme was, in essence, pointless. (ed: he coerced women to ritually brand each other with his initials)

*

There's no expression of rich people, dominance, and wealth which is truly significant. What it amounts to is a coercion of sexual sensation by any means necessary. Inflating their sexual needs in such a way, through exhaustion, eventually deprives 120 Day's "libertines" of the usual libraries of sensation and thus they choose to employ more and more depraved methods to stimulate themselves.

The libertine's pleasure is very close to nothing at all-- the lives of at least 30 people are suborned just for the joys of about four people in 120 Days of Sodom.  It is possible to see the book as a story of a massive amount of waste. Of course this perspective equivalizes human life with garbage; tho this is the perspective of the book's libertines. They view the lives of others as a tremendous barge of garbage which they the privileged may pluck from at will, like seagulls.

The Marquis De Sade's philosophies on life, be that as they are for a version of sexual liberation which concludes the lives of women are pointless but for total subjection, are never convincing to me. I feel that they are arguments the times give context to: conditions are repressed, better to open up then to play slave to god and husband. Ofc the destiny of the women who "open up" is quite bad. 

This brings me back to Keith Raniere. He I think offers propositions similar to Sade: an alternative life to the mainstream-- a life of scientific building blocks for taking control of ourselves and the world. Let me provide some context.

Indie Game Designer Porpentine reviewed the NBC series Hannibal: 

I think a lot about fellow indie game designer Stephen Murphey's essay on Robert Walser, and this quote in particular: (which Porpentine quotes in her standout essay Hot Allostatic Load):

"The dream of an imaginary community that allows total identification with one's role within it to an extent that rules out interiority or doubt, the fixity and clearness of an external image or cliche as opposed to ephemera of lived experience, a life as it looks from the outside." - text sourced here

The dream of human existence is to live a life which is external with no internal living, no warm meatbag slip-and-creak of nerves, guts, digestive systems, psychological troubles, etc. etc. I think, in a way, the mafia sells this identity to its members; "our way", Cosa Nostra, Omerta, an alternative system of control. These of course designed to isolate people and turn them into bodies/soldiers/corpses.

There is no PURPOSE beyond concentration for those who wish to establish something like what Raniere or Jim Jones had, or what Sade imagined, or what Porpentine saw in the story of NBC's Hannibal. I think, in some ways, there is no purpose to FAMILY beside concentration. As concentration is the bringing of people closer together.

Intimacy *is* the goal of the "libertine". "I wanna be married and have 100 kids so I can have 100 friends. And no one can say no to being my friend." A quote from Michael Scott** of NBC's "The Office".  I see the same sort of impulse in Sade's libertines, who with total impunity curate an entire society.

This! Is the point of Raniere's brandings: the (attempted) creation of a society/social truth/identity. I see a similar impulse in the serial killings as depicted in Mindhunter's Ed Kemper:

"You know, women were initially indifferent to me. They weren't interested in sharing. My whole life, no one wanted to interact with me. Not even our cats, when I was a kid. The only way I could have those girls was to kill them, and it worked. They became my spirit wives. They're still with me." 

Ed Kemper, as depicted by Cameron Britton in Mindhunter

A ritual designed to inflict a social truth (the absence of the victim in our society) and a personal pleasure (the memory of a victimization).

I've been studying true crime as an interest for about a year, and I'll admit today that I am fascinated in social situations organized by selfish people. Like Keith Raniere's brandings or Ed Kemper's killings, the point is to create a social reality (scarred or dead victims) as a means to supplement personal experiences (the memories of the murders/ a support network of subordinates).

This was, ultimately, what Jonestown became about. People in charge manipulate societies purely for personal experience.

I think we all have, to some extent, some desire and ability to appeal to society. I think we all have the desire to live an external life, a vicarous imagining of our experience which would supposedly comfort our internal routine suffering. This externality includes opportunity. A person who is famous is widely thought to be so comforted-- an assured external persona, filled with opportunity, is thought to comfort our internal life. An imagined ideal life that includes prospects and opportunities.

Dealing with the future: proposing a revolutionary change in the future: changing your self through practice to create a future, better self. The future stretches out endless and fairly unknowable. Contrast that with the past, which we pretend to know. 

I think, in that imagination of our past, our identities rest.

*Angela Davis was fooled too-- we are all vulnerable, I think!

**These words spoken by the character Michael when he was a child, filmed in an interview with a puppet on a fictional children's tv program, "Fundle Bundle". Episode 18, Season 2. 

Cumblasters united: Ryan Murphey's""Hollywood"

I can only write if I belive in you, viewers. All art is apostrophe, which means "address to a person who isn't there". In that way, all art is appreciation!

The desire to be appreciated is exactly perverse... That's what you should take away from this... of course it's very stupid, l ike all perverse things

Patti Lupone is Chief Cumblaster!

thirty-four reviews

eric andre.

boiling point (1990)

/psychological realism doesn't have much credo and yet I find a definite gap between some director's ambitions and other's. Credit to the filmmaking practices which honor "the dreamy look" or heighten the everyday boredom we all face.

old forester bourbon

originally I thought it had a nutty taste but now I'm not so sure. all whiskey starting to taste like soda to me. tried "angel's envy" at my friend's wedding and it was like, not top shelf? but it had that tasty burn with the flavor in the high notes

dead man, jim jarmusch

my friend (roommate) kept going gaga over the textures in this film, her friend too, talking about how black and white movies often the filmmakers want to bring out the textures, three or four textures in this film, linear, floral, feathers/hair, and a weird beehive one she couldn't place

edward saint albee's "alice"

I just bought this because it was cheap and signed by the author. the bookstore I bought it from was the fence for theft from the library system I work at.

heaven can wait 1948

old style of gentleman which was a sexuality in this face and lips, delicate and gentle. kind of winning presence you immediately feel like you could trust. don ameche takes this trust and abuses it

the paintings of zak smith

I mentioned this in my "frostbitten and mutilated" review but I don't care for portraits drawn from photographs. it's dumb to say that considering how do I know what is, and what isnt, drawn from a photograph. I usually miss the appeal w.e.

squidbillies-- seasons 2&3 are good

tommy tone "bad to to the tone"

listened to this uhh twenty three times

wigle's rye whiskey

rye tastes like flowers and shit but wigle's is good enough to stay appealing. although I hate rye I can get it

stonecutter volume 5

good

kero blaster

bosses are good played 1/2

bayonetta

hate how the scope of the game narrows to be about this generic classical architecture + industrial setting especially since at the beginning it promises to be world-hopping

simpleflips

what's the appeal of simpleflips? he's sorta rotten at the core and always on the verge of falling over. he's not that good despite being talented. watching him is like someone trying to renovate a too-old skyscraper

tfue (a twitch streamer- simpleflips too -ed)

I keep thinking of david foster wallace's tennis youth in "infnite jest" who have nicknames and have a sort of pecking order eaten away by sheer athleticism, that there's something worth pursuing... comradely sort

communism

talked to some maoists who might see this. afai can tell viewing the cultural revolution in a mostly positive lens is bleh, seeing anything but all the usual negative patterns of communism in the great leap forward is eye-and-ear shutting. plus all the stuff about stalin and like, didn't the bolsheviks establish a secret police almost immediately??

did some research on the movement, learned maybe for the first time that some topics are wide enough to encompass several international views. that being said I feel 48% confident that these maoists are relying on conspiracy theories to wipe clean the slates of their heroes

anarchist coffee down the street

it's actually called "artisan's coffee house". zeke is friendly but the coffee's never been good, and even the good stuff, although the chai is to die for I've heard

kraynick's

best bicycle shop in pittsburgh epicenter I wonder if it's the case that as an artist your job is to go find a budding community and sit over it like a fat toad sharing criticism and free talent

barry lyndon

not actually all shot in natural lighting kinda ruins the movie once my friend john told me this. that being said though:

--the scene with the german farm wife
--the scene where barry throws the glass at leonard rossiter
--leonard rossiter is so hype
--the natural-lit scene with the english flag, like the second scene
--steven berkoff


the duelists 1977

fantastic but the ending sucks

johnny depp

johnny always gives the movie something to work with albeit it's often wasted. that's all there is to say

drive (the movie)

I didn't have much appreciation for the film outside the kissing scene and the opening, however in retrospect I like some of the settings, like the pizza shop, I like bryan cranston although he's underused, and I retroactively like oscar isaac because he's my crush

annihilation (the movie)

there's only two good parts, the first scene where natalie portman is grieving, and then the videotape near the end where oscar isaac is talking to his double. I like the interior of the lighthouse, I like jennifer jason leigh although she didn't save the end

the hateful eight

"quentin taratino can just shit out good movies" - the red letter media guys, paraphrased

el topo (already reviewd, albeit this review was written before the previously published review -ed)

quite excellent and jodorowsky gives a fucking excellent performance especially in the last 1/4

fellini satyricon

I watched the opening of this movie like the first forty minutes that my free trial of wondershare file converter managed to convert every third day for about a month

impressionism about anthropology and history is the way to go!!!!!!!!!!!!

the cook the thief the wife and her lover

I watched the first forty minutes of this film an awful lot, too. fellini satyricon just stays really fucking good the whole movie though and this film only knows how to do 2 scenes

the rum diaries (2011)

this movie only knows how to do three scenes and it just vacillitates between three: johnny depp is doing something, aaron eckhart says "sea of money", amber heard blue balls johnny

aaron eckhart

kind of our george clooney if george clooney had to retire

ex machina (2014)

think about this all the time. not bcause of technology but bcause of oscar isaac weird sexiness he imposes on "domhnall". "I put a port in her and if you fucked her she'd like it". modern male tech sexuality dominance stuff like who else doin that???

the tech industry's full of nerds

guardians of the galaxy vol 1-- bad

a woman under the influence (1974)

a bunch of good scenes and can't give enough credit to how it was filmed, handheld with an attention to and somewhat sloppy focus. think about gena rowlands gesticulations. stopped at the 2/3 point never got around to the end

eric andre show

in the eric andre show, isn't he filming himself grabbing at people's genitals or getting his staff to do that? if you watch the series as I have there's a lot of eric reaching for people's genitals or his staff doing that to irritate the guests/people.

lamentations of the flame princess- good but my developing dm style, the harsh stuff, is drawing criticism... is an instadeath trap so inappropriate?

luke kennard's "cain"
Luke Kennard is FUCKING AROUND with this one. "31 anagram poems [of] Genesis 4:9-12". around each of these is a frame of red text transcribing a fictional DVD commentary. can't figure these out

wuvable oaf: blood & metal

wuvable oaf is good and queer baby

marquis de sade's "juliette"

somewhere within this tome is the chapter wherein juliette goes to visit kinda a bluebeard guy who has a castle full of human furniture. read that excerpt in andre breton's anthology of black humor. can't find that part

"the heart, she holler" reviewed

the heart, she holler review

i could do a review of PFFR and like vernon chatman but I don't have the biographical skills to really get anywhere with that. PFFR with uh wonder showzen xavier and the heart she holler does tv horror comedy. grossout, internitonally terrible social critique, apocalypse, extremely high joke density. heart she holler has 4-5 great comedic actors doing their damndest in a free-spirit environment. patton oswalt heather lawless jonathan hadary amy sedaris. everyone else on the show is at least a good support. 

drawing out the horror and weirdness in southern soap operas and then riffing there, bristling visual and auditory excitement. you could talk about joke structures but its sort of pointless; there are a lot of jokes. sfx are profuse immaculate and perfectly self conscious. my favorite horror bit is amy sedaris's kids who are like "the room" kids, they live their whole lives in a space beneath her well-used mattress. they're filthy, speak in neutral monotone and have quiet smiles on their faces... being led back in to their hole one says "is this part of the joke? Ha ha, I get it". 

part of horror is the bristle, taking you to that place and squeezing, "ha ha I made you uncomfortable!" its just what I needed... make it mean, make me suffer...

 .  .  .

some of my favorite tv producers like brendon small seem like they're boring california creatives. jon h benjamin the exception probably bc he's like a california creative who takes up a public persona. But they all look grapes of wrath people:

Still from "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (1948)

Vernon Chatman.

Still from "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" (2000)

H Jon Benjamin.

Brendon Small.

Still from "The Grapes of Wrath" (1940)

brief reviews of some explicit movies

Duane Hanson's "Woman Eating"

visitor q

necrophilia scene is the best, plus all the followup. and the kid who beats his mom with the carpet beater's good. also the opening scene at the love hotel. what's not to like? the quality of the film online is not good as much as I would want it to be. 

caligula

blowjob/marching scene is good, that happens like near the end when caligula is prostituting all of the senator's wives. overall this movie is a boner (the bad kind) and malcolm macdowell's acting which isn't good anyway is destroyed by his makeup. Like there's a lot of sorta porno camerawork where the edit will go to a close up of someone's genitals. But there's also a surprising amount of restriant believe it or not, as much as it's mostly heterosexual it also at times seems like a genuine attempt to bring out some gravitas. the husband/wife newlywed rape by caligula scene is also good at least conceptually.

der samurai

a german queer cinema film, kinda low budget, has some good acting, some really good action choreography, at times, with Pit Kukowski at least. you have to give the queer message credit (the killer is the prophetic lover of the protagonist) but I think there's a more uncomfortable deeper sexuality, animal lust, that the movie doesn't credit or use. I mean yeah in the final scene Pit's dick is out and he's getting a boner but... he's not using it? 

Like, emerging queerness is alike a killer with a sword, cool yeah, it's like a wolf, little more cliche... where's the sex.

bullitt

relentlessly pro-police but still a good movie. one of those films with a really complicated plot; but executed with the as-advertised genuine police dialogue. I love scenes of political power struggle set up by dialogue set up by overlapping and conflicting professional social scripts

letterkenny

dialogue, yet again... but also action, and music. there's a good and complete understanding of albertans and 3-4 different slices of the social pie: jocks, indians, the more traditional farmers, meth-heads. Each group, the farmers especially, has a total patter, a complex, constantly funny, wide social band of emotion. The show often kinda stops there and it's good enough, it's really fucking good.

there's this constant dreamworld of sex and young adults where all the older people are gone; there's a sense and a hint that the main family, most of the family, are survivors of child abuse... and what happy survivors... what a community, an idyll, could be, even with meth.

the show  eventually dissolves into just really good wordplay, which is like saying "my sex life eventually dissolved into just really good nipple play".

westworld 1973

best scene, the loser-turned-hero finds a damsel strapped up in a cell in Medievalworld. he rescues her and offers her water. she refuses, he insists, he pours the water into her and she short-circuits. about half the movie seems interested in drawing out that message but there's a lot of wish-fufillment too-subtly undercut by it. that being said we all know the movie's success is due to the concept which is pretty good; I mean they're running through Pompeii and everyone, robots and guests, are stabbed dead on the ground, there's some shots of them getting all stabbed to death too.

a clockwork orange

did I already review this? more and more convinced it deserves to be watched on a bigger screen, I have a chunky old huge HD crt. U have to watch from the start and focus on the red and then u can kinda not mind as it zooms out and just take the music in. and yea the rape scene that comes in a little later is well-coordinated fersure. But I really like the music am sort of convinced of Beethoven's power. But yeah other than that the social dynamics wherein these mod beefed-up guys are everywhere, are sort of the child protectors vs. ppl like alex, that's cool... you have to get into rape scenes like I'm getting into and then you enjoy the singing in the rain scene pretty much but I think I like the stuff in jail even more, not any prison-rape but just Alex studying the bible, having these slow, procedural conversations with prison officials... kubrick good at bringing those to a fever pitch

eyes wide shut

in 1080p the blue light used behind nicole kidman in the dream confession scene seems super artificial, and if you watch a documentary you can pick out the parts where tom cruise is on a treadmill and they're using front projection. thought about hyperrealism last time I put this together. specifically duane hanson's "Woman Eating", bc, you know, every scene outside of the orgy scenes are built to be hyperrealistic and that's what you can appreciate, depiction of reality with all the cues. Also Tom Cruise is eternally lovely as Bill, I noticed the moral struggle outlined in the semifinal scene for the first time a couple watches ago, Bill in his social script having to outline the moral compromise he is going to make with his superior Ziegler.

the devils 1971

pretty much perfect, the decline starts with oliver reed's limited range but michael gothard swings in and reinvents the picture. trap me in a convent, baby!!!

the plumber

better than I expected, despite the post-bourgeoise leanings it still goes on a great tear with Ivar Kants and it's quite sexual.

I walked with a zombie

hatian houseman with a guitar sings a ballad and walks up to the female white protagonist, and it's supposed to be menacing. really great scene with the white guy's alcoholism, there's drums in the background slowly getting faster throughout a dinner scene confrontation. there's that sequence where the females go out wearing lowing flowing robes towards the voodoo ritual in the woods and its quite magical, like a genre transposition into fairytale. so many scenes with the surprising good lighting. you watch old movies sometimes and this is one of those which is actually good and holds up, it's trying to make horror out of white people having to deal with black people and in the process manages to showcase some black actors / culture which is like, exceedingly rare in 1943, it's what gives the film life

el topo, the holy mountain

recently some buzz in pittsburgh about how row house cinema disclosed to its customers right before a midnight screening of el topo that alejandro jodrowsky apparently filmed live rape which is in the movie. no credit to alejandro for phrasing it that way for fifty years or whatever, and you can't know the conditions of the actress and so on, so who's to say? I'm fading into "never giving a shit about the ethics of the filmmaker, or maybe even of production", trying to figure out the theoretical props for that statement. anyway el topo is through and through a master's movie, the holy mountain is actually worse. u could say "it reclaims the western" for el topo and it'd be fair. I prefer some other movie to the holy mountain I forget what it is

charlotte rampling

you know what's funny? C.R. is really good in "zardoz". in a movie that is overfull of practical fx and a stupid hippy ensemble cast that's used quite well anyway Charlotte has these sharp three second reaction shots, does the dramatic scenes with the full of her vigor, to bikini'd sean connery. and she gets on a horse and rides the fuck out of it, furious... 

CERA & KNOPE

2010's "Scott Pilgrim": at once, a legitimate ballad to video games, the showcase for about 10-15 of ppl born in the late eighties-nineties, a visual spectacle and faithful adaptation of the (decent and fun and a little deep) graphic novel. And also completely ruined by Michael Cera.

Look at this excited, confused little asshole. Look at his stupid face. Sure, he's projecting a mix of misery and determination, he doesn't have the acting skills to back it up tho... maybe when he's fifty.

.

When he looks like a sad sack of shit, like he is. Michael Cera is a nebbish. A schlemiel. He doesn't deserve the girl. He's a much a son of a bitch as Leslie Knope was. 

Don't get me wrong. I think Leslie Knope is a decent character. She's a schlemiel, and she's lucky. But I don't like the show's treatment of her. It gives her too much success. And not only that, but her success is aspirational. I don't want Michael Scott to succeed either.

It's because I like my comedies dark, and I don't want them moralizing at me. And I don't want the butt of the joke to get ahead. Comedy is for the suffering. 

So who could have played "Scott Pilgrim"? It is Paul Dano.

Paul Dano isn't a schleimel. He just plays one on TV. He actually can act. It's 'nuff said. But basically things have some dramatic weight when you can show real suffering, the comedy is good, baby!! Also... it takes a chad to play a virgin... a winner to nail the loser.

twenty three reviews

twenty three reviews


new star wars:

the last jedi was how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. as in global warming. the exact connection is hard to tease out - I saw a dark sun behind the real one, riding my bike back home. actually it was a streetlight


neo turf masters golfing:

not much a game vis a vis gamefeel, it’s not Wii Sports Golf, but everything is narrated with a high-energy sounds like vietnamese woman and there’s the pixilated golf swings. it’s weird to see the direct ancestor of Mausland which you had forgotten about


Wii Sports Golf

The putting on this is insane. you have to hold the controller pointing down, it turns out. even then there’s this tiny band of sensitivity out of the whole controller’s movement that responds aggressively and makes you fling the ball off the green. other than that, this game is one of my favorite friend negging tools, for one, but there’s also a demure peace.


infinite jest:

the real “killer diller”, IJ, is like the only book I can read as if it were TV. I remember reading this four years ago and thinking “wow, I bet this is the first step I’m going to take into a world of talented authors” and like, noooooo. You’re gonna give me a reading recommendation for Neal Stevenson and my face is gonna drip off my skull. IJ is the only book I can read as if it were TV


DCC rpg (dungeon crawl classics)

sadly, the most beautiful book in the OSR (old school revolution-- the renaissance of tabletop role playing games) is also bland and sad, much like stonehell (see below). there’s sort of no surprises left


Stonehell dungeon

both this and DCC are written in like, boring fantasy prose (I already said this)


Black Books

I mostly watch Bernard Black to try and pick up on the psychopathic funny bits he does, yelling at people as a sense of humor, most british comedy shows like the IT crowd with just a touch of funny prop use make for good shit


the nintendo switch

the design of the switch is innovative to the point that the vocabulary of video game controllers hasn’t caught up yet. It’s “joy-con”, not “controller”and when I say “hold the controller like this and press this button” it can be confusing especially since the buttons aren’t labelled to work on the individual joy-cons, those are referred to positionally, a position which only fits if you hold the device the right way anyway. ok, so the main screen thing is the “console”, right. if you have the joy-cons attached to the console its the “console, with joy-cons attached”. If the joy cons are separate, they are “separated joy cons” or “individual joy cons” or just “joy cons”, there’s a sort of abstraction that bleeds from the procedure and is associated with the visual language on screen telling you which buttons to press- it’s the “left” button, when you hold the joy con up? down? you hold it in the seperated fashion.


Doll Doll Doll

odd when horror actually gets to the point of changing you emotionally, especially when it’s music. I think something awful got transmitted to me about killing children, like maybe the “cool” side of it? I was like, oooh, child killing is edgy and cool, ya know, like as an edge-of-society thing. maybe society’s edge is somehow linked up to our inner sense of passion? hell ya


Doki Doki Literature Club

odd when horror actually gets to the point of changing you emotionally, especially when it’s like a pop culture sensation jump scare game, but like I knew cute high school people who’s cuteness was a facade for intense psychological disorders, and DDLC does not really derivate from real-ass problems people have. Maybe also something like the snare of anime portraiture does me every time, psychotherapy


Getting Over It with Bennet Foddy

I don’t have anything new to say, except the throughline of frustrating drops away pretty easily and then it is just a tight mouse-platforming game, which will still insist that it’s about frustration. Especially of interest is Bennet Foddy himself playing Getting Over It, and him making the exact frustrated sounds f/x live that he put in the game.


it’s also fucking funny


Devil Daggers

Nice to see perfect things, in every way perfect, that do not assume and merely create a relationship, a weld

welds your brain to your hands, is conspicuous in perfect, as: every part takes up the exact minimum of space, has nuance, tesseracts, makes sense, is obvious, every part refers to every other part: a game about shooting skulls in hell on a stone ledge where if you get hit once you die, high score is 8 minutes 13 seconds, the instant of your death your score is submitted to a complete & international scoreboard.

what occurs to me is that sense of interconnectedness, every part taking up the exact minimum spare to approriate and flair every other part, with an overall vision that complements the thing, is in itself a seamlessness reminiscent of hell. which says good things for hell, honestly


yoon-suin: 

reading this book and oestensibly running it made me realize I shouldn’t use content that I don’t love, in my tabletop rpg games, because then I’m gonna be playing pretend about some stuff I’m not that invested in, and it’s all gonna seem trite. Despite the relatively strong prose and composition, I basically have no interest in the orientalist adventuring the book offers. as with DCC above


vornheim:  there’s a sense I get with a couple lamentations of the flame princess products of a greater project condensed and foreshortened, like I feel vornheim with all the praise it gets is only 64 pages long and the cover which you’re supposed to roll dice onto is pretty small. I feel the same way with Veins of the Earth, maybe, and probably with A Red and Pleasant Land both which I dunno how much I trust the terrain generators thereof. It’s too hard for me to launch a ARAPL campaign what with the geography and endless rooms-- I always imagine some huge procedural generation engine to handle it all for me

I usually want game books to provide, in easy reference, original, interesting content, which is easy to use, not work-intensive.  this is not true for AR&PL and Veins where it’s a campaign book where you have to assemble all the pieces; you have to manage a caves environment/ endless alice-rooms environment (both: dramatically different from normal terrain & therefore possibly much harder to describe), and provide some sense of direction, maybe. Both books are kinda bestiaries with a set of environmental goals added, and some tools. for other people that’s maybe enough but for me it’s a challenge to put it all together. I’m doing it right now with Veins and although it’s rewarding it’s also a responsibility.

but back to vornheim, what is there ?really?to recommend vornheim? a lot of people use it. there’s 2 dungeons, some rules for moving about a city, a bunch of nouns in tables, and a more general sense of what vornehim is supposed to be like. but uh “complete city kit” I don’t know I just don’t know what’s it’s like or what you need or even if my players would like a really high-concept city environment to work with. I feel like you can fit everything you need to know on a page. But I do use the noun list ofdifferent professions.

I wish there was kinda a more comprehensive understanding for how to run this just like AR&PL where there’s soemthing vital that remains unsaid. too vague of a criticism. “advice on running a city” too Idk. that all being said I actually feel yoon-suiin is an easier zone to run


maze of the blue medusa:

I’m glad this book has eclipsed into a “rare book”, it’s pretty suited up to be, and like a monumental breath of life into rpgs in general for the most part

like the writing and concepts and very especially layout are enough to present a pristine experience reading this

running it: I don’t like how glossy the pages are and the room shapes are impossible to convey that easily, then again if I just drew them out it would have been fine

also this crowded megadungeon doesn’t always have great dungeon ecology sense relative to zak’s pictures, and patrick’s writing, and the walls and secret rooms, these not always making sense  (maybe a plus, it’s supposed to be crazy). like a witch is supposed to be guarding a room with trapped rune-doors, but there’s another untrapped door off to the side away from the witch so...


edmund’s letters to nabokov:

bought this in the vain attempt to acquire nabokov’s writing re: lenin, at least more than the “bucketfull of milk with a dead rat at the bottom” remark. you’d think I have to read nabokov’s novels to learn what he thinks about communism but I just want the straight dope, son. anyway this book is mostly discussion of russian grammar.

it’s odd I think how hard it is to narrow in on that perspective of like post wwii thought on communism, or at least solely in my google search era capabilities


the killing of a sacred deer:

playful like “the lobster” but has more of a fire under its butt and is a little less dreadful. a sacred deer? the fun part is Barry Keoghan talking like a loon to distressed Colin Farrel


cuphead: Dont deal with the devil

fleischer bros animations have attack cycles if you look

I beat the robot boss with a hack

when I first saw this game I thought the huge, cartoony animations would blow out the gamefeel but playing it it’s tight, tight tight. there’s a certain versimilitude you get when all the sprites are the right size and have good rhythm and it’s especially impressive seeing this in like, the most expansive visual/audio project I’ve ever seen in a video game


caveblazers:

procedural roguelike jumpy games, spelunky, programmer art’s junky, arrows for arrows wasd but the double jump’s funky, mild and wild the game takes a while and I never beat it, seeing as I run out of steam about 45% of the way in, bombarding everything with my super powerful bombs

suffice to say it’s a good game, it’s got perks,probably every design trend since 2000, pretty well done, used to play it all night


hearthstone:

good and fun and yeah I got to hone my mana curve down to one stone, managed to get up to the point of facing combo decks before I went “oh, right” and turned that shit off


breath of the wild:

a series of overlapping & shallow resources, which have the advantage of being easy to refill, and easy to deplete. your horse can die, your weapons explode, but you can make about an infinite amount of food, but if you get in combats where you lose most of your heart meter in one hit, you’ll burn through it all quickly. so you can pick up up fairies at the fairy fountain without it feeling overpowered; sure, they’ll prevent you from dying but you’ll keep on getting hit.

that being said combat does sort of taper off in difficulty reltaively, fast but there’s still that consistent ability for it to surprise you with a couple different enemy types, or all your damage dealing weapons have been depleted, and you just wanna kill this 300h bokobkin for some reason, or you find yourself with an ice spear pushing frozen dudes off cliffs because you don’t wanna wear and tear your normal weapons. at this point in my game all I’m using is elemental arrows because normal arrows are too expensive

but it turned around when I realized hearts weren’t the only thing, it was also _navigation_, which the game takes seriously enough! there’s a couple points where you’d wanna use photos, or the map-stamps, or you have to look at photos and try to match it up and that all encourages wandering around, and thus more random encounters, and therefore more grinding up against the various resource-meters

90% of the art for the game though is not good, but oddly what it is that’s nice is the landscapes, “wild”, huh, which are gradually ruined by giant red laser beams that shoot across the sky the more you complete the game


super mario oddessy

main point of this game is the ass-end opens up like 900 more stars which you’re supposed to collect, it’s all in reference to super mario 64 albeit again it’s that fucking linerarity problem, in sm64 it’s like they didn’t know what level design was exactly so they just experimented and in oddessy it’s all boss battles with rabbits

fuck this fucking game man the colors are so bad and they got that dumb loop of music and like ⅗ of the levels are swimming levels damb… but you can pose mario and take HD pictures and share them and Peach has a different classy outfit for each zone


the relentless picnic podcast

in their earlier days there was the thought, bc of the election, that there was some boundary that had been crossed, and these were exciting times. but things kinda picked up in this wonky-no-worky fashion, all the crisis bled out. I remember the “id queen” episode of this podcast and it became clear that there was this sort of fascism donald was the head of. a feeling of stunned wakefulness in the company of learned friends. but then it kinda drifted off, like everyone did, there wasn’t something so super-insightful as you’d think there’d been, at least, not practically; I’m just worried/notworried/worried


la decimma vittima

the conception of sci fi maybe used to be philosophical and cooly so. what changed it I propse was an obsessive attention to detail, or any kind of fixation on reality. but really reality happens when you let go, when the guidance of things is allowed to exist and not hammered down; you can compare la decimma vittima to the star war prequels, or star trek original to the rest of star trek


overall conclusions: kiling children and satanic material has more to do with inner wellness, RPGS: pick two: [easy to run, good original content I want to run, consistent internal sense], the switch doesn’t have any good games, ultimately a life of pursuit of game-objects is unsatisfying and wears down your eyes