roadrunnertwice | Recent Entries

By the way, here’s an excellent essay about game design that I don’t think I’ve contrived an excuse to link yet: “Bomb Sense,” by danbo. (Danbo being the auteur behind Blue Revolver and, uh, apparently Scrandle.)

I think about this essay very frequently, not least because of how much I struggled to, like, independently derive the necessity and nature of bomb sense prior to reading it. (I went from “bombs are bad because they’re a mechanic the game doesn’t want you to use” to “bombs are legitimate but I’m fukken bad at em and can’t see how to get good” to “oh, I thought reaction-bombing was the be-all-end-all, but actually 80% of the time bombs are about either perceiving the future or detecting when you’re off-route”.)

He’s basically saying that bombs are a kickass mechanic because it feels awesome to use them well and they open up a lot of space for player agency and complex decision-making, but they’re a tough mechanic to build around because they rely on a ton of broad and focused knowledge and skill acquisition before a player can use them fluently. It’s this nasty design tension, where you’ve got this powerful experience that can’t be had any other way, but the way to lead a player into that experience is basically an unsolved problem.

Hey by the way!! I don't think I mentioned it here yet, but a month or two back, I finally notched that Mushihimesama (maniac mode) 1cc that I was working on! A pointless but incredibly satisfying achievement. 📺 I got a video of it up on YouTube if you're interested (you are not required to be interested).

Dealing with the gauntlet of stage 5 kind of unlocked a couple things in my brain, especially around routing bullet cancels. (Certain large enemies will erase all enemy bullets on death, and you often want to carefully time this to guarantee a safe recovery from a bunch of other enemies making the screen unlivable. This means you have to treat the scariest baddies as a precious resource, which is fascinating.)

Anyway, that's my first proper clear of a Cave title. I'm back to working on Ketsui, which I like better than Mushi but which I had put aside for a bit once I realized I was close to a Mushi clear if I focused.

Ketsui doesn't really have alternate modes or difficulties (unless you count the oddball arranged modes included in the M2 port), and it also doesn't have "rank" (dynamic difficulty, where the aggression scales depending on player actions) — it just presents the same impossible-looking wall to every player. But at the time I originally picked it up, I found that weirdly comforting — there was no question of whether I was "doing it right" or choosing the appropriate mode, you know? Pick your ship, approach your target, and attack.

Charles L. Harness — Firebird

July 20

So I was talking about Mina the Hollower and I managed to surprise bzedan (who was already background-discourse aware of the game) by mentioning that Mina is an anthropomorphic mouse. This is part of the base facts of the game's marketing, it's not a stealth reveal or anything, but apparently much of the ambient conversation around the game's gameplay style and approach to difficulty just never bothers to mention that it's also a piece of retro-90s furry media.

So then B mentioned this book, which turns out to be a rowdy, old-fashioned, SF/romance romp in which everyone is a cat humanoid, for no particular reason beyond "why not."

I’d have loved this as a kid, and I loved it now. It’s a timely reminder that you can really just go that on-the-nose/sincere/trope-y/etc. with a story, and it’s actually just rad as hell. In fact, what the vibe on this most reminded me of is that especially gonzo vein of old French SF comics, like The Incal or Metal Hurlant. Like, listen, this magical love potion wine is our only hope to empower two kitty-people to ride at near-lightspeed to the end of time, the twin nodes of the universal telepathic mind-control computer are in an abusive relationship, and the ur-mind of the Big Bang enacts its will through improbable coincidences and plot twists. C'mon, get in the car!!

Aria Bell — Grist to the Cannon

July 26

For the first half or so, this mostly seems like a power-fantasy action story, heavy on the gonzo magic duels (ranging from cartoony to psychedelic) and with somewhat random-feeling world-bricolage. Then it takes a turn into something a bit more wild and (to me, at least) more satisfying.

Not that I’m not into psychedelic magic duels, and not that it lets up on those in the slightest! But it adds some much more dangerous and exciting aspects into the setting (refurbished replacement universes, elder gods relegated to reality cleanup duty...), starts to reveal a very strange and very metaphysical cosmology behind it all (clearly what you call a “star” has nothing to do with anything I know by that name), and throws in a bunch of really messy daddy issues and brother feuds stuff (plus whatever the hell you call what Ulrich has going on with his semi-spectral companion).

All told, I started a little unsure on this but ended up liking it a lot. It’s apparently connected to a webcomic called Kidd Commander, and I got it as part of a bundle on the author’s Itch page that included some comics PDFs. I’ll check those out later.

Current Music: Broken Social Scene — Passport Radio

Adam de Souza — Blind Alley (webcomic backlog)

May 27

Readable online.

This comic rules! In proper old internet style, I learned about it because K.C. Green did a guest strip for it and posted it on his tumblr.

There seems to be a slow-burn plot going, a slight and gradual gravity pulling together these threads of psychic kids, cryptids, mechanical surveillance, questing animals, and semi-absent parents. But mostly what we've got here is a very classic (almost Peanuts-y) unsupervised kids comic strip with wry, biting humor and an incredibly special melancholy air, which somehow feels post-apocalyptic despite plenty of evidence of technological civilization in working order. (That last bit is an intensely familiar sensation from the hazy corners of my own childhood.)

I feel like I must have heard the name Adam de Souza before, but I can't for the life of me remember the context. I dug a bit and he's done some other stuff, but nothing I immediately recognized. He's clearly amazing though.

Bonus Level: Schildmaid MX

June ??

A horizontally-scrolling indie shmup, based around a three-phase bullet absorption semi-polarity mechanic.

I only played this briefly, because it didn't grab me; the production values were quite nice (so much juice!), but I didn't vibe with the shooting fundamentals and the levels and bosses felt pretty same-y. Also it was constantly popping up a stream of idle-game style achievement progress windows, which is how I learned I don't like that.

Bonus Level: The Roottrees are Dead

June 27

A mystery-solving game that merges the "index-em-up" gameplay of A Hand with Many Fingers and Her Story with the "identify three to confirm" gameplay of Return of the Obra Dinn. So effectively a very large old-school game magazine logic grid puzzle with a wide array of textual and visual clues, but you have to dig for the clues before you can use them on the grid.

This was pretty good! I had heard about it earlier and wrote it off because I found the art offputting, but a friend gave it a strong enough recommendation to make me reconsider, and I ended up eating the whole thing in a night or two. (I was in the mood for a logic grid.)

I really liked how the optional hint system in this was implemented. There's a duck you can click when you're stuck, and instead of giving you a direct hint about a character or event, it'll say things like "I wonder if there's more trails we could follow from X piece of evidence?" It ends up being just enough of a nudge to get you back on track without spoiling the fun.

Gamedev note: Godot engine. We're firmly in the second or third generation of good and ambitious games made in Godot, which is pretty neat.

Isaac Fellman — Notes from a Regicide

June 5

Ruth read this a month or two later during our big backpacking trip, and then while we were hiking she said “Hey, what genre is this, anyway? Because it feels like historical fiction, but it’s kind of the opposite.” I went with “realistic science fiction” (it’s 1000+ years in the future, but other than the stone yard the setting is 100% mundane), but she’s totally right about the historical fiction thing.

This is largely because of the half-setting of Stephensport, which our New York-born framing narrator Griffon absolutely perceives as a place from a different era, and which was deliberately constructed by its founders to function as a land out of time. (What a soul-melting place to live, tbh.)

That New York vs. Stephensport dichotomy is sort of the book's structural and science-fictional engine — it alternates chapters of Etoine's memoir of Stephensport with chapters of Griffon's memoir of living in New York with Etoine and Zaffre, from his teens onward, and to my eye the big difference between New York and Stephensport is how they comprehend the past. The seas have risen significantly (New York feels more like a Venice) and we've undergone a pretty significant technological collapse — electricity is rare and special-purpose, monumental steel-and-concrete architecture is a historical oddity, computers and microcontrollers are long gone. But New York keeps moving forward and changing; often recapitulating or rhyming with our own era's developments, sure, but still always putting one step in front of the last step. Interested in the past, but not possessed by it. Meanwhile, Stephensport has a death-grip on a pre-collapse fever-dream, frozen in a faux-utopian designed society. Of course it all falls down eventually, into something that, at least for the coming generation or two, seems much worse. But maybe not forever, and after all, the whole ruckus seemed driven by peoples' desire to have some kind of present and future, not just a past. I wouldn't assume a place with people like Sister Emma in it is down for good; all things pass, including that asshole Saul Cormé.

This is sort of a story about a failed revolution, the sorts of twists and turns in your life that might lead you into a doomed revolution, and the strange second acts you might live after the suppression of that revolution fails to eradicate you. But it’s mostly a story about trans resilience and tenacity and joy, and a defiant assertion that our people’s light will never go out.

Like the other Fellman book I’ve read (Breath of the Sun), this left me with a ton of, let’s say “satisfyingly unanswered questions.”

Right, so the thing about the ECS pattern is that it makes it straightforward and concise to do a bunch of the really nasty video game shit:

Intrusive and cross-cutting systems that affect a lot of entangled state across many domains. I'm not even gonna start with this, but perhaps you have seen something that qualifies.
Scheduling-level concerns — for example, gameplay systems shouldn't run while the game is paused. That one is really awkward to do properly in GameMaker, and about as hard as scratching my leg in Bevy.
Semi-isolated shared behaviors — for example, if it has HP and it's below 0, kill it; if it has a velocity and a transform, displace it according to delta time. You can handle these without thinking about inheritance, or repeating yourself, or having to remember to call some helper code in every creature's update method.

But there's one thing in particular where the optimal way to arrange stuff is slightly non-obvious:

Update logic that should run every frame for one type of critter but not for anyone else, which would go in the traditional isolated .update() method.

I've seen people arguing that this makes ECS a bad fit for the most familiar kinds of games, because ECS loves generic systems and generic systems lead to undifferentiated gameplay. I'm positive that that's not the case! It's just that you might have to think a bit about how to organize stuff, first.

Anyway, here's some tricks that I've found useful.

( Read more... )

Current Music: Qygen feat. Hagane — Stage Complete / Break Break

Oh, and also I just picked up Ginga Force and Natsuki Chronicles on playstation because for some random-ass reason they were TWO DOLLARS (/paperboy-from-better-off-dead-voice) for a couple of days, which is ludicrous. Those are the two most recent games by Qute (who made Eschatos and Judgment Silversword); they're very cool, and I was planning to eventually just pay full price for em.

I haven't fired up Natsuki yet (though I previously watched some footage), but Ginga Force is so wild and inspiring. The core of it is a story mode where you attack the levels one-by-one and accumulate a bunch of alternate loadout options, which is very anti-arcade design. (JSS and Eschatos both might as well have been arcade games.) The levels themselves are entirely designed around their bosses, which I find exhilarating — you're constantly interacting with (and shit-talking at) the boss throughout the stage, and can occasionally take a chip off em in between dealing with all the popcorn enemies and obstacles they're throwing at you. Structuring the level as a multi-stage chase scene makes for an incredibly grounded sense of place and context, which is exactly the kind of evolution I should have expected after Eschatos.

That's not really the first place I've seen some of those ideas; in Blue Revolver Val and Dee come to fuck with you mid-stage a couple times (and according to lore each level boss is directly remote-controlling their entire fleet), and a bunch of Touhou bosses fill in as their own midboss. But taking boss-based levels this far gives another effect entirely, and I absolutely love it.

Well, it's arriving at a good time for thinking about this stuff: I'm getting closer to a point where I need to buckle down on level and boss design for Ultra Badger Coyote (working title), so questions of how to build narrative and direction via action and space in a shmup have been on my mind. I think the best examples I've seen prior to this have been ZeroRanger, Eschatos, Radiant Silvergun, and oddly enough Ketsui.

Most Cave games are just structured as "here's a cool new space you ended up in somehow, here's some enemies that might be in that place, here's a boss" — it works fine, but it's not narrative drive! Ketsui, on the other hand, makes it very clear that you're wading inch-by-inch through the nation-scale defenses in front of a single bastardly target with a known fixed location, and the difference is palpable.
In ZeroRanger, of course, you're carving through the corrupted fleet to get to Green Orange — over the city, through the excavation, up the space elevator, across the solar system, into the battlestation. It all serves the directional momentum (well, the excavation detour is weird if you sit and think too long, but w/e, it works), and the environments are all extremely structured, with memorable landmarks and wholly unique enemy formations.
Eschatos is almost the same as ZeroRanger (which makes sense, they say it was their biggest direct influence) — over the city, over the country, through the atmosphere, TO THE MOON. It's not split up into levels in the conventional "take a break and show the score summary" way, so it all feels like a continuous and spatially-grounded journey. (Actually, Ketsui benefits from that too because of the transition areas they keep displaying during the stage breaks! Hmm.)
Silvergun is too complicated to get into, but your objectives and destinations keep changing as guided by the narrative, and the big bad keeps showing up to fuck with you, so you're staying connected to your motivation to knock over the final boss.

Unrelatedly, I'm starting to close in on a Maniac 1cc of Mushihimesama (using S-type shot) which is probably going to be my first clear of a Cave game. It's gonna be a bit, still; I'm missing some answers for the stage 4 boss, the stage 5 boss, and the section around 3/4 through stage 5 where it just goes absolutely apeshit on you.

I checked out Kiwi's survival strats video, but I can't use his approaches directly because he's using the supershot exploit, and I've committed to avoiding that for this 1cc. (Short story: there's a programming oversight that lets you do way more damage and counter-gain by setting autofire up in a particular way. Most players consider it legitimate in score play, but I want to see if I can clear the game the way the developers thought they were balancing it. Kiwi's video shows that there are several boss patterns you can just not deal with because the supershot damage lets you skip to the next phase too quick, so I'm definitely causing problems for myself on purpose here.)

qntm — Fine Structure

Feb 4

This novel covers some of the same ground as Ra, but I didn't like it as much — it didn't feel as coherent and directed, which drained some of the impact of the big gonzo ideas. Anyway, read Ra! I can't yet speak to There Is No Antimemetics Division, but I'll probably get to it at some point. (Actually, that's what I meant to read this time, but the hold line at the library was pretty saturated, so I diverted.)

John Scalzi — When the Moon Hits Your Eye

May 15

Kind of high-concept — the setup is that, in a miraculous occurrence that cannot be explained or comprehended, the moon turns to an equivalent mass of cheese, and then we spend 28 chapters flitting from character to character (only rarely making repeat visits to someone) to show a world Staying Entirely On Its Bullshit Despite It All.

Well-written and fun, but I think it ultimately felt a bit slight? Well... hmm. It's possible the ending will stick with me.

I found the end annoying — everything goes back to the way it was, as randomly as it began, and then a hundred years later it's fully accepted that it was all a globally-coordinated "megahoax." Kind of the whole thesis of the book is "what we do in the face of the senseless," and I feel like that ending is an especially grim final answer that I don't really have a response for.

Andrea K Höst — the Touchstone series (re-reads)

Jan 26, Jan 26, Jan 27, Jan 29

I was just in a mood to re-read some junkfood.

Andrea K Höst — In Arcadia

Feb 3

Oh yeah, so I noticed a couple years back that Höst had done another sequel to the Touchstone series, and this one was a romance novel about Cass's mom. Okay! Sure!

I liked this. Yeah, okay, it's very hetero, as is the original series, and I could name some ways to improve that. But it's doing some interesting and satisfying stuff against the standard grain of the portal fantasy format, which was also something I liked about the other, prior epilogue — it's really committing to exploring the consequences of deciding to stay in the portal world, whereas usually the decision to stay (or return) is the end of the story.

At the end of said prior epilogue, a significant chunk of Cass's old life decided to pick up stakes and hop through the gate the next time its rotation came around, including her mom, her brother, one of her aunts, two of her friends, and a friend's dying sibling. But then what? Laura's suddenly a dependent of her adult child, her other kid is on the struggle bus, and everyone's finding it a bit oppressive to be under global tabloid scrutiny every time they stick their nose outside their guarded compound. She's trying to restart her art career from scratch and there's still feelings from her divorce that she never finished unpacking. It's messy! I liked that.

Graydon Saunders — A Succession of Bad Days, Safely You Deliver, Under One Banner (re-reads)

Mar 19 – Mar 26, or thereabouts

Yep.

Martha Wells — Platform Decay (Murderbot... 7?)

May 25

It's Murderbot, I liked it.

I'm looking forward to some more exploration of Murderbot's burgeoning artistic/documentarian career, but this isn't that; it's a real fucked up extraction mission in a much bigger and more chaotic environment than our protagonist is used to dealing with. Also, it has started reluctantly going to therapy, and seems to be benefiting from that a bit.

There was something I mentioned in an old review of one of the other novellas in the series: something where the answer to an ongoing mystery turned out to be much less complicated than it looked, but then also paradoxically more complicated because of the way it didn't weave into the rest of the backstory in a tidy and contained way. A deliberately ragged edge that smudges the boundary between the small and comprehensible plot and the big incomprehensible world that surrounds it.

Anyway, this has that going on.

There’s a Greatures tournament arc on right now and it’s ludicrous.

Just discovered this new webcomic. I love this dumb lil strip about trading card smell.

I'm not actually too much of a framerate princess, like honestly 30fps feels mostly fine once I've spent two minutes adjusting. But unfortunately it turns out I'm both an input latency princess and a screen tearing princess, and that's a combination that will guarantee you a bed full of peas.

I'm mostly writing this here for my future self.

( You definitely aren't interested in this unless you landed directly on this entry via a search engine. )

So, in many recent years, there's been a massive fall PDF sale run by an on-again/off-again comics publisher called Shortbox. The gal who runs it, Zainab Akhtar, has a tremendous sense of taste and is plugged in to scenes of emerging cartoonists in a way that seems implausible, so the offering is always rich in this very particular overlap of weird/high-quality/unobtainable/inexpensive.

I think they're taking this year off, but keep an eye out in the future.

Nina Vakueva — Dream Loop (comics)

Jan 21

Shortbox 2025 haul. Lightweight but very nice looking.

MIUWN — How to be a Good Human (comics)

Jan 21

Shortbox 2025 haul. A cryptic little scented-vinyl nightmare.

Serena Cirillo — Joy (comics)

Jan 21

Shortbox 2025 haul. A girl absorbed in a work deadline builds a droid to help clean out the squalid family house she's moved back into.

I liked this a lot, it's got this old quiet one-off manga feel. You know how sometimes a really top-quality scanlation team will make a point of picking the most off-path stuff they can find, just quiet oddball things with almost no chance of a commercial translation? This feels like one of those. Hmm, I guess that was a really vague description in spite of its specificity. Anyway, it's quiet and contemplative and pretty. I thought the bridge scene in the middle where Joy is looking at Mari's old family photos and perceptual time comes to a halt was really striking and effective.

Mapurl — Injest (comics)

Jan 21

2025 Shortbox haul. I liked this a lot! A dark little story with a very pleasing shape.

Asia Miller — Jubilee (comics)

Jan 21

Shortbox 2025 haul. This was berserk, I loved it. A librarian with a pillbug motif joins up with a sluttily-dressed bounty hunter, and then a bunch of Incal-lite shit happens.

Pupi — To Buy a Forest (comics)

Jan 22

Shortbox 2025 haul. Slice of life. Not bad. "Burocracy..."

Fortune's Fool, Tess Powel — The Last Wizard of Cwmdafi (comics)

Jan 22

Shortbox 2025 haul. This comes in both English and Welsh versions, which is rad. Woman moves back to her grandpa's hometown to take over his wizarding business. Small town small business slice of life. Good ol' Cupboard Cat.

Erin Roseberry — Fallen into the Garden (comics)

Feb 6

Shortbox 2025 haul. Another lovely little SF comic by the author of The Maker of Grave Goods, this time featuring lesbian dogs.

lilyresh — Flood Water Maiden (comics)

Feb 6

Shortbox 2025 haul. Sort of a medium-dark mood piece in an ongoing catastrophic flood. Not bad, though it kind of trails off.

Jeff Noon — Falling Out of Cars

Mar. 21

It’s been a long time since I read anything by Jeff Noon, but he loomed large in my experience of the ’90s. This one was a Joanne McNeil rec.

Took me a tentative age to work through this, with many interludes of putting it away for months. This is intense psychedelic SF in a sort of tone-poem mode, and it’s in large part about dementia. It’s very beautiful, and intensely irritating and unpleasant to the touch; there has been a global and permanent outbreak of a strange physical and metaphysical sickness (sometimes called the Noise), and effectively it has fractured the entire world into a single vast Alzheimer’s ward with no nursing staff in sight. The effects of this scenario on the narrative voice and the momentum of the story are brutal. Most of the people we see are stumbling blearily on, drunk on loss and pain and dissatisfaction, and only intermittently capable of maintaining a train of thought or a thread of purpose.

Our protagonists, at least, are on a quest; a rich man who blames the current state of the world on a single great sin has sent them in search of broken shards of a magical mirror. The shards and their magic are real; it’s unclear whether the rich man is right about their connection to the Noise’s origin, but it’s very clear that the world’s fall cannot be reversed.

I think I liked this without enjoying it. I definitely had to hold its poetic pain and joy and delirium at arm’s length — don’t get too invested, don’t take these people’s assertions at face value, they do not always know who they were and what they're doing. Very nearly too intense for me.

There’s a brief view of some kids who haven’t known anything but the present world, and are building new visions of what it is to be a conscious being when communication and meaning have disintegrated; while I wanted more of that, I accept that our narrator Marlene was incapable of recognizing and evaluating their lives in the way I craved.

There's also one particular segment that I found superbly thrilling and creepy, and is sticking with me harder than the rest of the book: when Peacock is telling the story of the time he killed himself. Someone pulled the trigger; someone walked away; a mind within a body is present here today — any deeper chain of causation or stain of identity has been washed away in the noise.

This is a gamedev post.

Don't do this when converting analog thumbstick input to discrete up/down/left/right (d-pad/arrow-key) values:

Axial (square) deadzone; an off-center diagonal vector remains in the Y deadzone for a while after leaving the X deadzone.

Do this instead:

Radial deadzone with angle snapping cutoffs. An off-center diagonal vector reads as the same angle for its whole length..

( More detailed explanation below the cut. )

I've been loving Greatures, the current KC Green comic. It's a gag strip that takes place in some kind of purgatorial labyrinth that gradually reduces the people and objects caught in it into strange archetypes. (Much like a continuity-free gag strip does, now that I think about it.)

Everything's extremely fucked up at the moment, and I'm heartsick and volcanicly angry on behalf of my old home of Minneapolis.

"IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT" IS FAKE

MIGRATION IS A HUMAN RIGHT

DISBAND ICE

HAND OVER THE MURDERERS AND ABDUCTORS TO THE PEOPLE'S JUSTICE

THAT INCLUDES NOEM AND TRUMP

That's about all I've got on that. But, I guess I've also got some babbling about games and stuff stacked up in the queue, so let's post that.

Naomi Novik — A Deadly Education, The Last Graduate, and The Golden Enclaves (re-reads)

Jan 7, Jan 8, Jan 8

My friend Isaac got around to reading these and was loudly enthusing about them; that reminded me how much I loved em, and then I had to blast through a re-read.

Isaac pointed out a recurring thematic motif I hadn't quite pinpointed on my first read: some idealistic sentiment that began as cynical propaganda, but which ends up becoming real for a later generation that absorbed the sentiment before learning the original motive.

Bonus Level: Several More STGs

Get in loser, we're dodging bullets.

( Cut for extremely niche content )

When I was working at the counter in the bakery in Minneapolis, I would sometimes read a library book during downtime. (Hey, listen, you can't really go in the back and start mopping if you need to be ready to react to customers. Once you've tidied up the front, you're out of tasks.)

So at one point, a co-worker asked me "how many books do you even read?" and I realized I did not actually know the answer to that.

Well, it was the turning of a new year, so I decided I'd start keeping track of what I read. (I was also motivated by the cool new note-taking system I'd just built.) And since that was just a high-posting era for me in general (I was 24 and lonely and homesick and broke; Kiki from Kiki's Delivery Service with a bike for a broom and a LiveJournal instead of a cat), I started posting the book log on my blog and saying a thing or two about each book, kind of automatically.

That was at the start of 2007, which means that this year, 2026, will be my

🌌🌋🏜🏚️ ️twentieth year 🗿🕰️💾📟

of reviewing all the books I read (and some video games, as guided by whim).

What the fuck!!! Who even does that?

Well, I've stayed on it because it's been a lot of things to me, I guess. It's a great way to keep my writing knife sharp when I don't feel I have anything else to write about; it's a way to talk about stories, which is one of the great joys in life tbh; it's a way to trick myself into processing whatever else is going on in my life (you'll have noticed I stray from the brief sometimes) and to keep an eye on my emotional and intellectual temperature; and, sometimes, it's a way to connect with my friends or make new ones, which I guess is what I was starving for most in 2007. I think there's actually a small handful of people who look forward to the bookposts on this little journal out in the middle of nowhere, which I never really expected to be the case.

Twenty is a sufficiently shocking number that I feel I should do something special to mark the occasion. I'm considering gathering up a sort of "best of" collection of old reviews across the decades and making an ebook from em? Maybe I'll do occasional retro posts during the process? A zine??

I'm no good at hustling or self-promoting, and so my "audience" has remained very small. But for this kind of writing, I think that's probably best — these are home-cooked bookposts, un-mauled by the depredations of "scale," and you're the local fam that comes over to my house for soup sometimes. I think everyone should have small-scale connections of creation like that, and I'm glad you're in this one with me. Thanks for reading Roadrunner Twice, weirdos.

Well, it's also the end of a year, so here's the

2025 book census

22 Prose Novels

7 new (5 by women, 2 by men), and 15 re-reads (8 by women, 7 by men).

4 Nonfictions

All new; 1 by NB, 3 by men.

29 Comics

All new; 6 by NB, 16 by women, 7 by men. (haha, I had to go back and check on an evolving pronoun situation for that one. Just had a feeling. These categorizations are best-effort and provided "as-is," by the way.)

6 Reviewed Games

As ever, the games category is whim-centric and noncomprehensive; I played some other stuff as well, I just didn't have as much to say about it.

Well?

Prose novel count is up, but much of that's re-reads; new novels are stable, for a few years in a row now. Comics are up (from snarfing down all of Delicious in Dungeon). Games are stable.

What's it all mean? Idk. I never know. But anyway, rereading is good for your mental health when things are going weird.

OK, here we go — the final 2025 bookpost! And it's, uh, well, it's certainly something.

Daniel M. Ingram — Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha (2nd ed.)

Feb. 25

Readable online. There’s also a pdf on the site, but I ended up downloading the html version and scrunching it into an epub. Here's that, if you want it. (Hopefully the author won't mind a little light format-shifting in the name of spreading information. If you meet the Buddha on the road, right-click him and save as.)

This one's been sitting unreviewed because there's a whole big context around it that is going to be kind of annoying to explain. I'll probably make a mess of it, but let's try.

A while back, right before the demise of Cohost, I read this all-time banger of a post by Matthew Seiji Burns. I want you to read it yourself, but basically:

Feeling better is possible. I mean in a baseline, day to day, non-temporary way. [...]

[...] I am going to describe a kind of meditation with a goal to make a specific “thing” happen, because the thing I’m about to describe was the single best improvement to my mental health that I ever experienced. I think it’s important for more people to know about. It is totally achievable— not exactly easy, but not ridiculously hard either. It employs meditation not as an open-ended and never-ending practice, but as a specific, targeted activity. Perhaps surprisingly, you do not need to keep meditating afterward to continue to have the benefit it confers.

And then he gives you the recipe.

( This goes on for a little while, and maybe not everyone wants to hear about my adventures in, uh, let's say "experimental philosophy," so better throw in a cut tag. )

Alison Bechdel — The Secret to Superhuman Strength (comics)

Dec. 25

And then there's the last two reviews of the year, which, due to their content, are somewhat easier to write now that I've written all that context just north of here.

As coincidence would have it, Alison Bechdel's most recent book is all about her lifelong hunger to escape the illusory prison of the self. The framing lens this time around is that she's writing about "exercise," but you know how it goes with these weird spiral-shaped memoirs of hers: she's actually writing about more or less everything, and rummaging through literary history in search of signposts and cairns from people who might have been on this trail before her.

I really like this loose trilogy of autobiographies. Bechdel has this sort of frantic, vibrating intelligence, and these books feel like spending a series of pleasant late nights with her during some period where she's almost-but-not-quite gotten her train of thought under control and can spin out the entire spirograph mandala shape for someone who happens to be on her wavelength. Powerful ADHD friends energy, basically.

Anyway, a recurring thread through this one, both explicitly discussed and arising from things she just depicts happening, is that she very much is on the same hunt as I've found myself: the quest to dissolve some boundaries between the self and the universe, and also to stop fucking hitting yourself with these goddamn illusions.

She also, and I wasn't expecting this, made a case that I should go back and read The Dharma Bums, even though I figured I was done with Kerouac. I'm not sure I'll be able to see what she saw in it; it seems likely situational. But maybe worth a try.

Bonus Level: Slay the Princess

Nov. ??

(Content warning: horror game with lots of murder and some gore.)

I'm still cleaning up some of the weirder inner routes that I haven't seen yet, but I think I've done enough full loops and endings that I can say I've played this game. And: it rules.

As I think I've mentioned before, I've had a kind of standoffish relationship with the video game genre called "visual novels". The default point of view for a very large swath of the format seems to be the blank-slate "self-insert" character (this is very much a legacy of the dominant "dating sim" sub-genre of VNs), and somehow something about that kind of repels me? Like, it's meant to be "me," but my agency is constrained to often prevent doing what "I" would actually do? And also, deliberately choosing things foreign to what I would do feels much weirder and grosser with a self-insert stand-in. We always kind of half-inhabit characters in a story, that's much of the point, but I prefer having a more depicted personality as an initial scaffold to hang my imaginings on; even in a CRPG with a blank slate protagonist, you usually go through a formal scaffolding process of building out their appearance and history and capabilities, which goes a long way toward making a more usable vessel for imagined choices.

This is very much an inconsistent reaction; I'm sure you wouldn't have to look hard to find something I like a lot that gives the lie to that as a general principle. But nevertheless, there it is! It's meant I've always held the genre at arms-length a bit, and despite having enjoyed several VNs in the past, I've still been kind of waiting to "get it."

I think Slay the Princess has helped me get VNs a little more! To start with, it quickly becomes clear that the protagonist is extremely separate from the player (and in many ways separate from their own self, but we're getting ahead of ourselves here), so that gets my aforementioned self-insert gag reflex out of the way.

For another thing: the actual gameplay of a VN consists of exploring what is ultimately a static tree structure, and since the branchings are one-way gates, this requires repeated runs. StP weaves these repetitions into the story itself, with two layers of epicyclic repetitions on top of the non-diegetic new-game repetitions. (The innermost loop starts when you're on a path in the woods, and the middle loop ends when you [REDACTED] a vessel to [REDACTED].) This isn't a generalizable technique, it really only works for this specific story, but that's a big part of why the game is so good — the balanced harmony of a story and a gameplay structure that feel made for each other. And the nested repetitions give this illusion of dynamism to the tree structure — your next pass on the innermost loop is profoundly affected by what you did on the last one, with the Princess's protean nature drastically mutated to match the protagonist's revealed personality. Anyway — that harmony helped make the VN tree-traversal gameplay fun for me in a way it hadn't really been before.

The other big part of why the game is so good is just that the art and writing are stellar. Abby Howard is an outstanding cartoonist; I know she's a good writer as well, so it's harder to pick out precisely what her husband Tony contributed, but I consider this a cut above her solo work, so he's doing something in there. There's some killer lines in this that continue to live in my head rent-free. (Solitary lights in an empty city...)

I kind of want to be careful about saying too much about the story, because it's one of those ones where the joy of discovery plays a big part. But: since I already knew the gimmick was a powerful one, I went in prepared for it to be more gimmicky than heartfelt. It was not. There's genuinely a lot going on in here, thematically and dramatically. Including, well... I guess, once you get to the late-game outermost loop scene where the narrator finally plays fair with you, you'll see why I'm lumping this game into this batch of reviews. (And if you traverse to the weird "happily ever after" inner-loop path, you'll see it even more.)

Current Music: Lena Raine - You're Not Real

Another end-of-year bookpost batch; we're down to two remaining books in the queue after this, which of course are some of the harder ones to talk about.

Vajra Chandrasekera — The Saint of Bright Doors

Mar. 24

This book is incredibly flashy and stylish. Dazzling? I think in cover-blurb dialect, you'd say "dazzling." Well, fair enough: I was dazzled.

It does lots of exciting things at the structural level — I'm thinking of things like,

The massive noisy violence of chapter 1, immediately followed by a chapter 2 that consists of six evasive sentences, followed by a smash-cut to Fetter's new home in the city of Luriat.
The long strange segment in the late book where it diverts into a surreal and almost allegorical-feeling prison planet milieu.
The freaky jolt when the narrator finally grabs control of the plot. (And what a strange ending that resulted in; I'm still not completely sure how I feel about it.)

But also the page-to-page prose and momentum are real impressive. And thematically, it feels extremely Now; like yeah, you're an apostate cult assassin and authoritarian shitbirds (including your awful messiah dad) are shredding the city you love, but also your mom's dying and is calling your landline to guilt-trip you, and you're worried that your attraction to this girl you're doing espionage on might be trending in the direction of cheating on your boyfriend, and all the people you go to therapy with seem to be way more committed to the revolution than you are and aren’t including you in the play they’re producing.

I liked this a lot. I think maybe I liked the first 3/5 of it the best, but it kept me extremely engaged all the way through.

Martha Wells — Queen Demon

Oct. 26

All riiiiiight! The sequel to Witch King, another entry in what is now the Rising World Series. This was great.

Like the last volume, this one tells two parallel stories, one past and one present — which is neat, because there was still a lot of missing mileage between the two after Witch King. (Including the source of that title, which we finally get the start of an explanation for this time around.)

Dahin is kind of my favorite, and much of the present-day thread of this book is about him.

Martha Wells — Witch King (reread)

Nov 16

Still good. Hey, here’s something odd I realized about Tahren’s character this time around: she has absolutely no imagination.

So like: from time to time in real life, you’ll run across people who have fucked-up conservative-authoritarian-supremacist politics but who aren’t full chud — they’re actually capable of empathy and compassion, but they’ll still parrot the most twisted bullshit about Black people or immigrants or queer people. I know someone who works at a rural hospital in the US who was interacting with a couple people like this on the regular at work, and we would talk about it and wrack our brains trying to figure out what the hell was going on: how could someone be able to exercise fairly impressive amounts of care and sympathy, but not extend it to anyone on the Republican bogeyman list?

One of the spitballs I threw out once was: what if empathy and imagination are independent, and these people have no imagination? If they have direct extensive personal experience with someone with a marginalized identity, then maybe they can relate that to their inner map of humanity, but they can’t just like hear about or listen to some category of people and then use imagination and analogy to relate to their experience, and so if they’re isolated and living in a homogeneous culture they start watching Fox News and voting for scum.

Back in the ’00s before they all got purged or assimilated and the party went full death-cult, you’d sometimes get high ranking Republicans who would break with the party line and start riding for gay rights when e.g. their daughter came out, and I feel like this model might have explained a bit of that; maybe some people just can’t recognize anyone’s humanity unless their face gets physically rubbed in it, but after that they can sort of manage it. Pretty weird??

Anyway, that’s Tahren, actually. Watch for it, you’ll see what I mean.

Linnea Sterte — A Frog in the Fall, and Later On (comics)

Oct. 27

A quiet and gentle graphic novel about some amphibians who take to the road in rural Japan. I liked this, and also enjoyed just stopping reading for a few minutes to take in a landscape and let my mind wander.

Patrick Miller — From Masher to Master 2

Nov. 7

Published on the author's Itch page.

An unusual little ebook about playing fighting games.

I guess what’s unusual about it is that it’s not really about playing fighting games; it’s more about purposefully turning into the sort of person who plays fighting games.

Much of this ends up being about finding ways to engage with (and ultimately help create) the “fighting game community.” Miller’s constant refrain throughout the text is “if you aren’t playing fighting games for the people, you’re missing the point.”

As it happens, I started playing a little bit of Street Fighter 6 in the past year; I fell off in the summer and then entered my shmup era, but I intend to get back on. I was enjoying online play, but the possibility of joining in-person events felt pretty distant. Miller’s perspective is one I hadn’t heard articulated this directly before, and it was pretty thought-provoking. I’m not entirely sure I want to commit to the lifestyle* per se, but this left me with a more concrete view of what that might actually mean.

* Actually, brief sidenote on a different fightin' thing I read earlier this year. There's this bit in Sumac's Street Fighter 6 novice pamphlet where they're summarizing that game's online ranking tiers, and they say the following:

In some ways, this is the point of no return for building your skill level. Once you hit platinum you’re probably going to be able to comfortably beat anyone who plays the game casually and doesn’t go online. If you keep going on past this point, you’re committing to the lifestyle – nobody is going to enjoy fighting you unless they’re at least as into SF6 as you are.

This has become a surprisingly flexible analogy in our household — if you proceed past Platinum, you are "committing to the lifestyle." Ruth and I do a fair amount of trail running, and both of us have crossed the line where you have to start hanging out with running people instead of running with the people you hang out with. The same thing happens with fighting games, and the point of Miller's book is: that's the point.

Current Music: Soul Coughing - Fully Retractable

It's coming up on the end of 2025, so let's do a couple review posts.

Cameron Reed — The Fortunate Fall

Apr. 10

Holy shit what a ride.

Newly back in print after a long period of unavailability, this landmark work by the author of a favorite short story was brought to my attention with a link to an old Jo Walton review of it. Walton is a superior book reviewer, so maybe I should just tell you to close my tab and read her; certainly she made a watertight case that I needed to read this book immediately.

This is a 30-year-old science fiction book that feels new. It’s intense and paranoid and smart and scary. I bought a copy after reading it because I predicted needing to both re-read it and loan it out.

The author has another novel coming out in I think April, and I’m in, sight unseen.

Bonus Level: Persona 3 Reload

May 3

Persona 3 seems to have been the game where Atlus really nailed down their winning formula for the series, which they've been refining ever since. It's also the only one of the three modern main-line games that I hadn't played. And how convenient, they just released a remake of it last year!

With regard to remakes: This era sometimes seems like it would prefer to give us nothing but, and in general I would say I have negative feelings about that. But in this specific case, the brief seems to have been “the dramatic presentation ain’t broken, but let’s match P5’s battle system and visuals,” and frankly I’m on board. P5’s contributions to the state of the turn-based art were not small, and I was happy to pay a bit of a premium to experience a classic story I missed out on with like a solid 50% less slog. (That said, if you already DID play P3 a couple times on the PS2, I would expect that this is completely inessential. Having played P4 Golden a few years back, I have no plans to fuck with the upcoming P4 remake.)

Wow, I’m committing some circumvegetal battery today, aren’t I. Anyway, I enjoyed this a LOT. The characters were superb, the plot was twisty and satisfying, and it had that classic Persona balance of engrossing life-sim loop and risk-hungry dungeon crawling.

All three of these games have some strong point that raises them above the others. P5’s hand-crafted story dungeons and rotating cast of menacing-yet-pathetic villains are SO motivating, and feel decades more advanced than the abstract threats and surprise big-bads of 3 and 4. In P4, the narrative/mechanical harmony of your party members literally confronting their shadow to unlock their powers is the best version of the “Persona” conceit around, and binds your party together in purpose just as well as P5’s superior villainy does; possibly better. In P3, I think the rifts and tensions within the party might be the star of the show. The setting of the game is dark and paranoid, and that paranoia seeps into your own people in insidious ways. The struggle to trust and protect each other despite that is the thematic core of this one, and it remains solid and resonant.

I played this with the Japanese voice cast (the English cast are very good, but sometimes it’s nice to get a bit of listening practice anyway), and there were a couple of standout performances. Well, mostly I mean Yukari. She’s my fave in general, but there are a couple of scenes where she has some emotionally raw material and just kills with it. (She’s the one I had my protagonist ask out, because obviously, and the climactic scene of that path really sticks with me.) Also, honorable mention to your homeroom teacher; most of the game she’s just wry and funny and above it all, but there is ONE scene with her after the final battle that only appears if you complete a particular social link, and it is just about the funniest shit I have EVER heard in a video game. We’re talking severe stomach pain.

Bonus Level: Persona 3 Reload: Episode Aigis

Nov 21

This is a ~$30 optional DLC. I enjoyed some things about it, but it’s flawed and inessential, and I don’t know that I’d recommend it, even if you loved the main game.

First off: it’s a continuation of the main game’s story, but that story didn’t need continuation; it already ends at the correct moment. This also relies on some pretty random contrivances to provoke its conflicts. I see it more as an ok what-if fanfic than as a properly canonical coda. (I had been hoping for a bit more backstory on the original shadow research from before we all got here, but no dice; it’s all looking back at more recent trauma.)

Secondly, and more frustratingly: it lacks all of P3’s life sim elements. It’s just the dungeon-crawling and shopping. So you’ve effectively got half the gameplay of a main-line Persona game, and the dungeoning gets tedious without the social calendar to space it out and contextualize it.

Ryoko Kui — Delicious in Dungeon vols. 1-14 (completed) (comics)

Jul. 31

What a tremendous comic! There’s so much there there, thematically and dramatically. I think I already told you this was an all-timer when I was 2/3 through it, and it very much stuck the landing. And it’s so, so funny, between all the world-at-stake drama. You should read this. (I actually bought the whole run, which I won’t normally do with a manga these days.)

Here is something load-bearing in the story that I don’t think I’ve seen talked about much: the way the Winged Lion is so beautiful. My boi is the prettiest kitty. He just like, glows, with a pure inner light of kindness, such that even when you’re starting to get onto his tricks you still kinda want to believe him.

I think the parallel with Aslan must be intentional, and feels like part of a comprehensive Buddhist critique of Christian conceptions of divinity, permanence, and the possibility of satisfying desire. (I may have mentioned the thematic density??)