uuupah mini thoughts

is this where i thought i'd be, looking forward as a teenager to my late 20s? at a bus stop at 21:16, cross legged on the footpath, writing a blog on a computer in my lap? i suppose they wouldn't be that surprised actually. my mini thought of this month is that i noticed a new behaviour in myself, this unconscious understanding of, and frustation with, the wrinkled blob of grey toothpaste that sits inside my skull. the physical machine that makes my consciousness possible landed me in an interesting thought pattern recently where i found myself recognising a bout of work-related anxiety rising up in me, and instead of freaking out i just rolled my eyes in a "great, now i just need to ride this out for the next hour" kind of way. it was interesting! i think of myself as being able to logic my way through my feelings (and am realistically probably only about half right) but this was a really interesting medititative reaction. i was talking to a friend about the concept of interoception - understanding of the way that your body is feeling - just a few days before, and while i dont think the two instances are related it has got me really interested in the concept

music

i'm continuing to struggle my way through my massive album cull, and despite trimming my library down to about 800, i'm still haven't reached my initial goal of being able to quickly skim my library and make that unconscious link to the music that suits my mood in a given situation. i've come up with a couple of options that might be my next step after the cull is complete

1. just give up and come to terms with the fact that i won't be able to remember everything i my library at all times
2. get better with making playlists. i should do this regardles, but i actually find it really difficult
3. trim my library down drastically again, to something like 250 albums. i'd like to hope this works similarly to that theory that you can only really have about 250 friends, but its also a completely arbitrary number
4. make a new library but do a additive process instead of subtractive. only add albums where you look at it and go i know what that is! and i know that i like it! kinda feels like a cd collection in that way
5. completely start from scratch and just add like my favourite 30 or 40 albums and go from there

honestly the last one is the most tempting to me. i definitely need to stop holding on to albums because they feel like i owe it to them in some way. an old album or an artist that a friend likes shouldnt automatically get a space on the shelf if i'm only so-so on it

massacre - killing time

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talking heads - remain in light

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this is so unbelievably embarassing but i actually only listened to this album for the first time this month and it immediately skyrocketed up my personal rankings. this is a true nothing but hits album that i find hard to describe, but i adore its self indulgent kinda goofy style and high energy

gwenifer raymond - last night i heard the dog star bark

games!

talos principle 2

i mentioned the talos principle 2 back in february but not the conclusion to my playthrough. i really enjoyed the original, but was (a tiny bit) saddened that the plot followed the classic "superintelligent ai is forcing you to complete these puzzles for some unknown but probably nefarious reason" shtick. i thought some of the plot and setting was a bit cheesey, but i was still intrigued by the big mystery and, most importantly, found the puzzles pretty effectively challenged you without feeling outright impossible to someone with an average intelligence.

one particular setting quirk in the talos principle that i was ambivalent about was the heavy inclusion of greek myth and philosophy. this includes the titular talos principle, a fictional mythological story about the real (but still mythological) talos and how its difficult to draw a line between a conscious machine and a human, positing that the difference is only in their material and that their humanity is more difficult to debate. i found that this deep dive into what was not that complicated of a concept dragged a little bit by the end. the talos principle 2 (spoiler) instead focuses its philosiphising on the politics of a society of a fixed size, with a more knowledgeable community and with people that functionality live identically, as well as (double spoiler) whether they have a moral imperative to make as little impact on the world as possible, or to continue exploring the stars and the universe. it's really unique stuff, properly good science fiction. in some ways i found the ending/s to be a bit unimpactful, but i also liked some of what they implied. i suppose i've played a fair few narrative puzzle games so i'm maybe tempered for an ending that's just so/so as long as the game itself is fun

and i think it (largely) is! theres a couple of systems that improve on their talos principle 1 counterpart - the most obvious being the the ability to (spoiler) transfer your consciousness into another robot body, which replaces a system where you would record your actions and have a hologram play them back. this new system allows you to swap at any time and undo most actions that you realise dont work, whereas the old system forced you to fully re-record the actions before starting again. the removal of the bomb robots is similarly a very welcome one - it means that it is extremely infrequent for the game to punish you with a start-over in a puzzle

i did sometimes find the puzzles a little too easy. there are 12 main areas of the game with 8 main puzzles each, but i normally only found two or three challenging. the first three or four were just introducing how a new puzzle element worked, and then i found about half of the rest to be more or less immediately straightforward to complete. the gauntlet at the end was really excellent though, and was a great bow on the end where a lot of other puzzle games tend to slump.

the more i write the more i think it might be worth writing a full post of this. watch this space!

metaphor refantazio

i bought this one on release and have played it in drips and drabs, but i think i've finally decided that i don't really like it and don't really want to play it anymore. the game's combat has been tightened up a bit compared to persona, and i think the direct connection between the world and the combat situations is nice, compared to the weird abstraction that sits between the two in persona games, but that's where a lot of my compliments end. it's missing the visual and musical charm of the persona games, and while theyve tried to do something with the painterly look it just ends up looking muddy a lot of the time. the characters also tend to be a little flat, which is an issue with some characters in all of the persona games, but i think it's harder to empathise with their plights through the fantasy setting. i am sort of burying the lead however, because the thing that finally pissed me off enough was the game's politics. the game's themes focus on different poltical leanings, with different main characters representing different political ideologies - theocracy, feudalism, anarcho capitalism, egalitarian idealism etc. the real stinker is the main character's party stands for some form of liberal democracy, which is cute, but your friendly characters will tell you off for being a little bit too much of commie when you say that maybe rich people shouldn't be given the opportunity to benefit off the poor. it gets pretty grating, and is hilariously at odds with the themes of the extremely popular persona 5, which is to say, everyone in power is a fucker and needs to be forced to reconcile for their crimes against society

couple of games that i'm interested in

splatoon raiders

i'm shamefully excited for this. i don't find the single player horde mode stuff as fun as the multiplayer elements of splatoon, so i'm still hankering for a splatoon 4, but the style and music and top notch movement shooting is enough to keep me interested. we'll see if it's enough to get me to buy a switch 2 though

constance

i saw this while mindlessly scrolling the nintendo switch store and was interested in how unapologetically it's inspired by hollow knight, but also actually looks pretty fun. a lot of hollow knight's contemporaries are, to put it bluntly, a bit crap, but i did a bit of reading and it seems like tihs one might be okay? i like the aesthetic, but i am a little cautious about the theme of "wading through the main character's mental illness" - i don't have an issue with the concept, but i've seen so many iterations that it's maybe a bit fatiguring.

neverway

i won't mince words on this one - it's illustrated by the artist for celeste, and features a score from disasterpeace (of fez, hyper light drifter and it follow's fame). the use of changing colour palettes is really clever and the full character illustrations are gorgeous

anime that sucks ass

im being facetious (mostly) but heres some of the stuff that i've recently dropped because i found it uninteresting

izetta

this was a cute idea, but the story felt very generic very quickly. smacks immensely of aldnoah.zero. the idea that the witch rides a giant anti-materiel gun is pretty cool, but not enough to carry an entire show

gachiakuta

i wanted to like this SO BAD because i think the character designs are really cool, but the story is so naff. i love when japanese writers latch onto something that feels not that revolutionary, like "junk is bad and recycling and reusing is good" and try to make it punk. i wasn't convinced

freiren season 2

i'm actually not 100% that the issue was this season, or just the fact that season 1 ended so mildly and left a bad taste in my mouth, but i couldn't really get into season 2. season 1 of freiren is some of the best anime i've ever watched, but the tournament arc shot a massive hole in the slow, contemplative experience. if i'm going to go back and check out anything on this list it'll probably be this one, but i'll also probably be okay

turkey! time to strike

i was enamored by the first episode of this show - i had absolutely no idea what to expect, and the (spoiler) introduction of the magic time travelling bowling ball in the middle of what looked like an entirely conventional high school sports plot did get my interest, but the next two episodes unfortunately didnt. oh well!

witch hat atelier

this is maybe a bit of a controversial one, but while this show is very pretty, and its worldbuilding interesting, the first five or six episodes failed to hold my attention any further. the plot moves pretty slow and i dont find the characters that unique. richeh and tetia are complete nothing-burgers, coco is the hyper anxious default anime character and agott is mean to a cartoonish degree

backrooms

i watched this one with some pals, and have been really interested in how different people seem to feel about it. the crowd i was with actually seemed largely disinterested, giving it threes out of fies, but other people i've talked to have absolutely loved it. i for one thought it was pretty good, and while i could nitpick pacing, or whether the movie should have had more creepy slow explorative scenes or where it could have had less creepy slow explorative scenes, i'm happy to just say that i enjoyed it

i have noted a couple of differences between me and what seems like a lot of the general audience of this film. i havent watched many horror films besides some of the classics like silence of the lambs and the shining. i didnt really care about the vhs sections, although I did appreciate the first person perspective. i havent watched the backrooms series. i actually think a lot of the stuff ive randomly stumbled onto about the backrooms fandom is kinda dumb - an infinite, empty, eerie facsimile of the areas in our world that people aren't really meant to be in is inherently creepy. isolation is creepy, as is being so isolated that you start to lose it. not good enough for the ipad horror babies though, who need some kind of eldritch creature stalking the halls. this rendition, and the way that it dodges any need for lore or an infinite series of deep dives is a way better implementation

the special effects are also kind of excellent. there are a couple of moments where you can see the blender lighting of it all, especially the sequence where the camera is moving through the floor and showing mary's room changing, but otherwise i found it all really convincing. i remember knowing about the wall that they phase through and preparing to rip that effect to shreds but i thought it was really convincing! i'm on the hunt for more behind the scenes videos to see the sets and if the weird warped objects were actually made for realsies

see you soon

i still have a lot of little media things i want to talk about, but this post is already out a fortnight later than i wanted it to be. see you soon!