1. Death Stranding
2. Neon White
3. Death’s Door
4. Knotwords
5. The Zachtronics Solitaire Collection
6. SNAKE FARM
7. Ghost of Tsushima
8. Cobalt Core
9. Card Shark

Everyone I know posted their Spotify Wrapped at the beginning of December. I went a different route and calculated my top 25 albums this year by time spent listening, multiplying scrobbled tracks by their length and grouping by album. (Full list below the fold)

My 2.11 year old opens the door to the bathroom while I’m in it, says: papa, whenever you’re done, wheneve-when you’re done with your penis or butt, when you’re done pooping or peeing, or pooping and peeing, papa when you’re done in the bathroom, can you go to the basement and get my baby yoda doll from out of the basement?

NoahTheDuke

reviewed Death Stranding: Director's Cut

★★★★★

★★★★★

Completed

on

PlayStation 5

The first real mission, you have to carry your deceased mother’s body to an incinerator for cremation. As you leave the compound, the camera pulls back as Low Roar’s Bones plays. Once it ends, you’re left with Sam’s labored breathing and footfalls as the only soundtrack. After delivering the body and lighting the flame, you encounter the otherworldly enemies, the BTs, for the first time in gameplay. The fetus in the glass womb at your chest sobs nonstop until you get away from them.

My second kid was born less than a week before I started playing, and my wife’s mom had died unexpectedly 6 months before. I found the entire mission so emotionally trying that I put the game down until the start of the next year.

Once I returned, I found a singular experience: meditative, taxing, scary, poignant. I drew a lot of comfort in the effort it took to travel between destinations, relaxing into the mild challenge and allowing my adhd-riddled mind to quiet. The story, on the other hand, repeatedly knocked me on my ass. I cried multiple times, found both pain and solace in the way it handled death and grief and loss. Each of the major characters brought a different aspect of the recovery and healing process to the forefront, and their respective performances were unmatched in games.

I take issue with the focus on gun-based violence in the game. It felt great to play, I won’t lie, but it was so discordant with the themes of pain and disconnection and reconnection that I found myself disappointed in its prominence. Especially at the end, with 4 violence-focused bosses in a row, it felt like two games fighting each other for primacy.

Accepting that, I think this is a nearly-perfect game, and have spent the rest of the year thinking, “this other game is good, but I should go back to Death Stranding and run some more missions for the preppers.”

Reviewed on Dec 25, 2023

Me: i wonder what its like to enjoy giving and receiving presents
My wife May: you’re an insane person

NoahTheDuke

reviewed Cobalt Core

★★★★★

★★★★★

Completed

on

Windows PC

I’ve beaten the boss twice and each time, I feel like a god.

The music is brilliant and the art is cute and the writing is really funny and the conceit feels right for the gameplay.

Reviewed on Dec 22, 2023

Perfectly captures the experience of the original Pokémon Red/Blue soundtracks. Catchy, fairly simple, sick solos, every track is memorable. 10/10

Game is good too, btw.

Every time I watch it (sit and view, or spy it while my kids watch it), I’m taken aback by Abuela’s callousness and cruelty and selfishness. In the opening, she’s tender and kind, and then the rest of the movie she’s heartless. And giving her a last minute redemption by way of her sob story (that we already knew! there’s no reveal! the movie opens with it!) washes away all of the pain and hurt she caused.

It’s a movie wearing the clothes of “healing generational trauma” that provides a convenient excuse for older generations. According to the movie, all they have to say is, “I was hurting too” and not only is your pain not allowed to exist anymore, but it’s on you to give them comfort and kindness. Alongside that, no one else is responsible for their culpability in allowing this to happen or for how poorly they treated you. (Seriously, fuck Mirabel’s parents. Spineless cowards.)

I don’t feel like writing the whole comparison, but Turning Red does a similar story better.

I wrote this draft months ago right before bed, planning on coming back to it in the morning. Now I don’t remember what my breakthrough was. Damn. The description below of jnet’s problems is well worth reading if you give a shit, but never resolves lol.

Original post:

Me, holding six books at Half-Price Books
My wife May: that’s a lot of books for someone who doesn’t read books.

the funny thing about chat servers is that they're self-contained communities. to feel comfortable in one, you need to spend enough time to both know the other people and to be known by them. you gotta learn the implications and usages of the emoji, you gotta learn the in-jokes and the history, you gotta actually put in effort to be a real part of the community! you can't skip right to the "i enjoy being here" part.

i've been in the netrunner slack server for ~7 years. i only have a handful of channels i'm in, and only some of those that are unmuted. i know the regulars, i know and have created the emojis, i am in it. i only got here because i've been chatting and contributing and reading constantly this whole time. just for my little corner! not even the "whole" server, just the channels I'm active in.

joining the discord for some new thing is not exciting, it's daunting and intimidating because that means to actually join and care about the community, i need to be willing to put in the high effort it takes to pay attention and participate. it's not a small task, it in fact might be the biggest task.

@voidmoth asked:

do you have a preferred method for generating/integrating CSS in Clojurescript projects (via Garden, CLJSS, or whatever else) or do you just end up writing CSS normally?

I think Garden is super cool, but I am not a frontend kind of person, so I don't have further strong opinions. For jnet, the original dev used Stylus which we have continued to use. I find css in generally pretty hard to read and stylus in particular very hard to read lol (very deep nesting with no brackets???) but it works so it's hard to hate on.

got to the last batch of stages in neon white and these might be the best yet. spoilers below

a friend asked me recently about my "poly" status with my wife, and i started to write a short thing which turned into a long thing. here it is as i sent it to her, to avoid editing and nitpicking it into not getting posted.

here's a bunch of pieces that all kind of commingle here, so it's a bit of a mess, but the short version is something like:

1. i am poly and can and do experience familial and romantic love for multiple people at the same time.
2. i am a human bound by causality and time, so i can only do one thing at a time at any given time.
3. conceptually "love" is infinite and i can care about many people without effort, but relationships require time and energy for them to have any depth.
4. given that, if i'm going to have a meaningfully deep relationship, i need to put in greater and greater efforts to both achieve and then maintain it.
5. at a certain point, i can love multiple people, but i find myself disappointed when i want to have a shared history with someone (my now-wife May) but my history is split across N people. Shared history is an important aspect of relationships, and personally, i find great joy in being able to say "remember when we did X?"
6. likewise, when i was single and ready to mingle in 2017, i had basically infinite time to meet people and to spread myself out. that extra time has shrunk bit by bit since and now i have roughly 1.5 free hours before bed every day. if i want more than that in a given day, i am necessarily depriving both my wife and kids of valuable time with me and forcing my wife to do stuff like "make dinner, entertain the kids, put them to bed" alone.

Me: the sunset is beautiful. Fall is amazing how it feels like the sun has been setting for 4 hours.
my wife May: so true bestie 😌

i have a number of friends i used to see semi-regularly (at least once a year) that was helped by us both being active on facebook. now none of us are very active on facebook and i had some kids and everything is harder to schedule.

it's easy to say, "hey i know we haven't spoken in roughly 4 years but i miss you and hope you're doing okay" but how do i have it continue after we finish the pleasantries? the opening is easy, i just wrote it, but after, one on one conversation is hard to sustain without the ease of in-person dialogue.

i keep up with other friends because we're in group chats, so there's less pressure to speak directly to one person, you know? i can just throw into the chat "here's a dumb meme, here's a stray thought, here's a comment about my day". but when it's one on one, it feels like the silences are longer and it's harder to maintain any sort of connection.

Before I got married, I heard lots of advice about how to handle money in marriage, such as “have separate bank accounts” and “only use one joint bank account” and “as long as bills are covered, you should buy whatever you want” and “every penny must be accounted for to make sure nothing funny is happening”.

Back when we were Dual Income No Kids, I just sent her my half of the bills (as I had moved in with her and they were all in her name). It was easy and simple. Once we had our first kid and she quit her job, there was a question of how to handle spending money. I switched my direct deposit to give me an allowance (personal bills, etc) and then send the rest to her with the comment that she could spend as much as she wanted, that I both trusted her and thought she deserved to buy whatever she wanted.

This seemed fine but after two years, she admitted that she didn’t feel free to do whatever, that because her money was muddled in with the bills money, it felt bad to spend it on herself (even tho she knew I was okay with it).

I’ve started Death’s Door as a palate cleanser after finishing Ghost of Tsushima. I’m an hour in and most of the way through the first dungeon. This game rocks. Feels good to play, the art is pretty and reserved, the music is real nice, and I like this little universe they’ve built. I’m surprisingly intrigued by the main conflict and I can’t wait to see where it goes.

On the one hand, I don’t wanna hate on someone’s favorite thing.

On the other hand, I’m watching a truly boring-ass deathcore band rn and while I already don’t like deathcore, these folks are only making me hate them and the whole genre even more.

Giancarlo Esposito face: you think deathcore is not metal. I think classification arguments are dumb as shit and deathcore sucks regardless of what genre it is. We are not the same.

got the platinum trophy cuz i was roughly one hour of collecting away from it.

good game, would recommend. i spent way too long on it tho. i tried to resist my base urge to do everything and accidentally did everything, so it took me 55 hours to reach credits.

i chose to honor my uncle’s wishes at the end of the game. it was the sadder choice but it felt right and it nicely wrapped up that story.