More things I read/played in 2021

[roadrunnertwice]

Only another three or four things in the 2021 booklog after this! Well, like I said before, it was a bit of a slim year for reading.

Ann Leckie — Provenance (re-read)

Aug 2

This book is still great, and in fact it might be better on re-read, now that I know not to expect it to resemble the Imperial Radch series in the slightest.

Structurally, I think this book is more or less a farce! It just maybe takes a minute to catch on to that, because it’s a farce with a deeply strange sense of humor.

I read this on my phone while we were acclimatizing in Mammoth, it looks like.

Ann Leckie — Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, and Ancillary Mercy (re-reads)

Aug ??, Aug 29, Sept 6

Then I launched directly into an Imperial Radch re-read, because why in the world not.

David Graeber — Debt: The First 5000 Years

Oct. 1

God I miss knowing David Graeber is out there.

This book was a lot to take in, significantly more daunting than Bullshit Jobs. But although it was slow going at times, I found it really enjoyable and thought-provoking.

Martha Wells — Fugitive Telemetry (re-read)

Oct 3

Sure I’ll re-read a book I already read this year. Why not!!

You’ll be pleased to know this is still good.

Bonus Level — Inscryption

Nov 9

This game's great! Everyone has probably already told you this. A bunch of the fun is in the wild twists it makes, so I'll try and make my comments somewhat cryptic.

• Somehow I whiffed the neon-vision puzzle in Act 1 by being too good at the Act 1 card game. 🤣 I didn't need to invoke the triggering condition until the final boss, and if you do that it skips the post-battle restore and jumps straight to the end of the run (although it does something cool to your memorial card). I did like two more fruitless runs after that, and had to ask Isaac for a hint! Anyway, if you're at a dead-end and there's an in-game tool that you've been avoiding using, try using it in a couple runs before the last boss fight.
• Re: events around the ending, and some of the surrounding lore that came out of the postgame ARG: I was originally a bit hung up on the implausibility of the Karnoffel Code (a ~48-element permutation) containing something THAT complex and autonomous, and also couldn't make sense of the protagonist's reactions after being exposed to it. But after thinking about it some more, I've decided it doesn't contain anything at all; it's just a completely arbitrary symbol. Like a name. The name of something very bad, which knows when its true name is being spoken and is able to influence any system that speaks or perceives it. 💀

• Apparently the dev is releasing an infinite roguelike version of Act 1 as an alternate game mode (with expanded mechanics and a difficulty-ratcheting ascension system like in Slay the Spire), because Act 1 has the most thoroughly fleshed-out gameplay loop and there's a chunk of the audience who wanted to keep improving their runs instead of being pushed into the story-focused late-game.

  I find this hilarious. I mean, it's great: Act 1 works very well as a game and it'll be cool to let the mechanics breathe like that, I'll totally play this. But literally this is happening because a bunch of the fans think Leshy was right and are insisting that the developer should allow his plan to succeed! Mullins couldn't have designed such a perfect extension of the game's lore if he'd tried to on purpose.

Ben Hatke — Zita the Spacegirl (comics)

Dec 20

I finally read my ex-library copy of this before sending it to my nephew as part of his Christmas present. (The other part was Hilda and the Troll.)

This is a great kids’ comic! Something like fifteen plus years ago I read a bunch of the wordless Zita one-shots Hatke used to post on the Flight forums; I remember them having excellent cartooning, and this had excellent cartooning too. Cute art, good critter designs, clear and strong action and acting, good stuff.

This reminded me of, like, a very B-side Henson Company joint from the late ’80s. I will not expand or clarify that.

Nephew reportedly liked it too. :]

Bonus Level: Celeste: Farewell

Dec. 9

Farewell is a free DLC for Celeste, which they dropped as a surprise a couple years ago. (The game has had many mechanical updates and tweaks, but this was the only new content it ever got.) It's very very good, if you're willing to struggle.

It adds to the story, but only a tiny bit — the whole thing takes place in a dream, where Madeline does some Symbolically Authentic Mountaineering to work through some grief and guilt. (Granny [the old woman who lives on the mountain, not her personal grandmother] eventually died, and Madeline Got Anxiety too severely to make it to the funeral.) At the end, she wakes up and has a video call with Theo, who found an old photograph showing that his granddad (the famous photographer) once hung out with Granny on the mountain when they were both like twenty. It's cute, it fits with everything we know about these characters, and it's wholly nonessential.

This expansion is just a little less than a whole extra game's worth of new content and new mechanics, and it is flat-out the hardest video game I've ever beaten. 😧 After finishing it, I started burning through the C-sides; I bounced off them before because they were too daunting, but now they've been downgraded to nice little post-Farewell cool-down exercises.

But while it ends up at well above C-side difficulty, it gets there gradually, and I think it fills out a bit of a difficulty chasm that the game used to have — the jump from Core-B to Anything-C was so severe, and now you can get past some of that in a setting where there's a little bit of dialogue and interaction and new mechanics to lure you onward. Like with many of the best video games, much of Celeste's quality lies in how carefully it teaches things to the player, and there's now a genuine on-ramp to the outrageous level of play that the speedrunners have been developing all these years. (Like, oh my god, it teaches and requires the Wavedash, an emergent movement tech so busted that I can hardly even believe it's always been embedded in the game rules.)

Really what Farewell adds up to is a celebration of just how unbelievably solid the base game was. The core mechanics were so good, and the balance and challenge were so satisfying, and it's a delight to have an excuse to go back to it and really push myself to my limits and beyond.

Also, I honestly feel like Farewell forced me to learn new fundamental things about how to approach an impossible physical and intellectual challenge. (For example: I knew about "chunking" being a critical part of human perception and memory, but I hadn't quite put together the effect it has on perception of time — if you can consolidate a chain of actions into a "chunk," it clears a little moat of extra time around it! You can do all kinds of little adjustments and corrections before and after the chunk, even though you know there wasn't previously enough time for any of that! It makes sense when you think about it, but the screens in this game were laid out in a way that let me watch it happen in real-time, which felt absolutely bananas... and gave me a new bone-deep faith that I can clear little moats for myself like that in any effort where I can consolidate a chunk. That might actually qualify as "life-changing.")

Also also, at some point after Farewell came out (in 1.4.0 maybe?), Maddie Thorson patched the splash screen with her new name and new company name, and I think that's cool. 🏳️‍⚧️

Comments

[azurelunatic]

I love Provenance so much. Ingray's scattering hairpins! Her determination to follow through where the wild adventure takes her! She is so completely out of her depth but just keeps trucking on where a lesser person might have said No This Is Much Too Silly, I'm Out.

[roadrunnertwice]

I love Ingray too!! 💖 I admit it took me a while, at first I was like who is this useless baby, but like so many things, it keeps coming back around to that Fire and Hemlock bit: embarrassment and mortification can inflict suffering on Ingray, but they can’t actually stop her.

[azurelunatic]

When I first read it, I went "wow, holy untreated anxiety disorder, Batman!" and my opinion has not shifted that much except to be more delighted.