Spectre Collie

Just Married

About our small but special wedding ceremony last Friday

Last Friday, January 3, 2025, I got married to my fiancé. You may all applaud.

We’ve been engaged since 2019, but neither of us were in much of a rush to plan an actual ceremony, not least because it’d be a lot of work to plan something appropriate that’d satisfy all the friends and family we have scattered around the country.

That changed with the 2024 election. California voters did vote to put marriage equality in the state constitution — something that was “de facto” accepted after Obergfell v. Hodges, but not explicitly guaranteed — but we’ve already seen how Republicans love to use LGBTQ people as fuel for their culture wars, to distract from their abject incompetence. I’m sure that the few remaining Republicans I still have any contact with would insist that there’s nothing to worry about, and that threats to reverse gay rights are just fear-mongering.

Which is, to put it mildly, complete bullshit. The most corrupt Supreme Court justices in my lifetime have been threatening to overturn marriage equality for a while already. And we’ve all seen first-hand how the Republican party went all-in on attack ads against transgender people during the election, something that curiously didn’t seem to bother all the “decent Republicans” we keep hearing about. It would be foolish for any gay couple not to protect themselves.

But I hate to cheapen any major life event with anything as stupid as American politics, so I’ll just say I’m glad we were incentivized to do it quickly. We got a license last month and scheduled a civil ceremony at the local city hall. My assumption was that we’d do a quick, bureaucratic, and unromantic ceremony first, and then have time to plan the “real” ceremony sometime in the future.

Literacy 2024: Book 7: The Bullet That Missed

Book
The Bullet That Missed by Richard Osman

Series
Book 3 in the Thursday Murder Club series

Synopsis
The gang of retiree cold-case investigators is asked by a local news caster to investigate the death 16 years ago of his good friend, a woman who worked at the station. Meanwhile, an elusive money-laundering tech wizard known only as The Viking has threatened to kill one of the club unless they help him take out a rival.

Pros

Charming as ever
The book is much better at managing the tone, pulling back right at the point things are about to become too twee or silly
The poignant moments baked into the premise still have impact after three books, instead of feeling like iterations on the same idea
Does a remarkably good job of maintaining an ever-growing cast of characters, without losing any of them for too long

Cons

The ever-growing cast of characters means that the mystery itself has less weight
The resolution of the storyline with the Viking was too cutesy for me
The relationship at the center of the mystery never felt meaningful; we were told how much the victim meant to this character, but she never felt like a real person

Verdict
It’s impressive that even as these books turn into more of a “catch up and gossip with friends” running series instead of solid mystery stories, they’re getting better at being more grounded and less twee. It’s still often silly to the point of being absurd, but they’re charming in exactly the way you want a cozy murder mystery to be.

Note
Only 7 books read in 2024, which is low even by my standards. I think I’m actually going to skip the Goodreads challenge this year (instead of saying I’m going to skip it and then doing it anyway), since having a target number makes it feel more like a chore than a hobby.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Dance Like Globey’s Watching

Two tunes to have yourself a queery little Christmas

This year we watched the Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special, which should be one of everybody’s Christmas traditions. The thing I was most struck with this year is how timeless it seems. I tend to think of it as a time capsule of peak 1990s television, even though it was released in 1988.

I also tend to think of it as this bizarre little one-off gag, making fun of traditional Christmas specials. My 80s brain said that it was a cute joke that they have Frankie and Annette in the cast, and that the locals like Chairy and Conky are given top billing over Oprah and Cher.

But now I can recognize just how much love they put it into it, as if they fully intended for it to still be watched and beloved over 30 years later. Part of that is that the camp — even the playhouse annex being built by buff, shirtless construction workers using fruitcake — isn’t just a sly wink, sneaking gay stuff into a mainstream TV holiday special, during the Reagan era, when the anti-gay “family values” culture war was still in effect. Instead, there’s a real sense of “this is stuff that we love, and eventually, the rest of you will catch on.”

How else do you explain Grace Jones’s fantastic performance of Little Drummer Boy? It capitalized on Jones’s persona as way too outre for the mainstream, made fun of that (“Sorry, Grace, back in the box!”), and then gave it the space to be a show-stopping highlight.

Not to mention defiance of the attempts to gaslight the entire country into believing that it’s always been a Christian Nation of Straight English-Speaking White People, by having Charro perform Feliz Navidad and bringing in Miss Rene for “the Hannukah portion of the show.” (Along with Jewish dinosaurs playing with a dreidel).

The part of the show that I’ve had “a changing relationship with” over the years: kd lang’s wonderful over-the-top version of “Jingle Bell Rock.” (Still the best version of the song ever recorded, IMO).

Back when I first saw the special, I thought it was awkward and tone deaf. Surly teenage me said, “Yeah, kd, we all get that the show is campy, but it’s supposed to be cool as well. You’re a little too on-the-nose.” It was corny, or had I had the word back then, cringe.

Now, of course, I can recognize what an uptight little bastard teenage me was, bundling everything up tighter and tighter for fear of looking uncool. In my defense, it was the 1980s. (And I was still very very much in the closet). Now of course, I can recognize it as someone who was defiantly and confidently asserting her own style, just as much as Grace Jones was, but who’d just recently burst into the peak of her mainstream popularity.

In other words: she understood the assignment exactly, and she delivered a performance that she knew people would still be watching over thirty years later. Or if not, then at least she’d give it everything she could, all while having fun with it.

So I’m wishing everybody Happy Holidays and a very Merry Christmas, and my wish is that we can all live our lives with the unchecked, fearless enthusiasm and joy of kd lang in the Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special.

A Sense of Like a Dozen Endings

What We Do In The Shadows had a satisfying end to the series, and then a whole bunch more. Spoilers for the Finale and final season.

What We Do In The Shadows will most likely be one of my top 10 television series of all time. It was never “appointment viewing.” I’m sure there’s a lot that I’ve forgotten, and I probably couldn’t give details of entire seasons, much less individual episodes. But overall, it was relentlessly¹ clever, surprising, hilarious, goofy, and as much as I hate to use FX marketing language: fearless.

One of the things that I most respect about the series is that the comedy and the tone were all over the place, but it always felt true to itself. It could be almost unforgivably corny, shockingly daring, and astonishingly clever all within the same episode, and sometimes within the same scene. One episode would feel like a traditional sitcom bottle episode, and the next would have an over-the-top bit of gruesome violence as a punchline, and the next would be a visual effects showcase that seemed far beyond the budget of a 30-minute comedy series.

As an example of how varied its comedy was: the gags that seemed to take hold with viewers the most, like “creepy paper,” Jackie Daytona, or the cursed witch’s hat, were rarely my favorite, but were usually alongside the funniest moments of any television series I’ve seen. I don’t know what the production of the series was actually like, but it sure seems like they would ignore the concept of a “show bible” or a consistent tone or style, instead choosing that anything was fair game as long as it’s funny.

Leading up to the finale, there was an episode inspired by The Warriors where the action was instigated by a character having his head burst like a tick and then ripped off at the neck; and then an unbearably awkward office party at a supremely shitty venture capital² firm, which somehow made me even more uncomfortable. The series will have some of the corniest jokes you can see coming from a mile away, followed up by someone vomiting a torrent of blood or having their entrails spill out onto the floor. And it rarely feels too over the top; always exactly the right amount of excess.

That anything-goes mentality seems to have gone into the finale as well, where they decided to just try every possible ending they could think of. I only just found out that there are even a couple more I hadn’t known about — if you weren’t quite satisfied with the Newhart finale, you can go to the extra features to have Nadja hypnotize you two more times, with two more heavily-referential endings.

The series could have ended with the penultimate episode. It didn’t give closure to everyone’s story, but it was a very sweet and fitting ending to Nandor and Guillermo’s. Gizmo finally realized he was never going to fit into the human world, and Nandor finally started to treat him as an equal partner, and he proposed a new life where they fight injustice.

But it’s probably more fitting that the end of the series is the end of the documentary. It was full of meta-commentary on the series as a whole, in particular calling out the criticism that the series could’ve ended after season five had wrapped up the story of Guillermo wanting to become a vampire. I did appreciate that they explicitly acknowledged that the vampires were just going to keep on living their weird, stupid, after-lives, doing basically the same things over and over again for centuries. But it often felt more like it was giving closure to the writers more than the audience, giving them a chance to say goodbye to the series after six years.

And I’d never blame them for that! But I do think that my favorite aspect of the finale was the documentary crew just stopping the characters mid-interview, saying that they had enough footage. It was so callous and disrespectful that it felt perfectly in tone with this series.

The other thing that’s perfectly in tone with this series is taking it to the line of what’s tolerable, and even past that line, but then knowing exactly when to pull back. They can be so mean, or so gross, or so nihilistic, or so selfish and inconsiderate, or so violent, or so stupid, that the characters seem irredeemable and the writing feels like an overhard attempt to be edgy. But then they’ll have a surprising moment of kindness or cleverness that makes any sentimentality feel earned.

They did exactly that with the end of the series, choosing to have it both ways. They got the tear-jerker where Guillermo says goodbye forever and turns out all the lights one last time… and then they got the adventure-nonsense ending, riding a high-speed coffin elevator down to Nandor’s hidden underground lair. The key wasn’t just the effects — which, again, seem like way overkill for a 30-minute comedy series — but the fact that Nandor and Guillermo got to sit in the coffin together, as adventure pals instead of master and servant.

Now that it’s over, I do have a favorite moment from the entire series. Not the funniest, but the one that sums up exactly what I think is wonderful about the tone of What We Do In The Shadows. It’s in season five, when the vampires’ neighbor Sean is staging a pride parade as he’s running for office. Guillermo has just recently come out, and he’s given a special place in the parade: sitting by himself in a lawn chair on a flatbed truck, holding a sparkler and a piece of poster board reading “GAY GUY.”

It’s a good gag on the surface, because the characters are paying lip service to inclusivity without genuinely getting it. The result was Guillermo going through all the stress and self-doubt of coming out, only to be tokenized and put on display.

(As a side note: I liked how the show treated homosexuality as being distinct from Nandor and Lazlo’s hypersexuality; the series has mentioned the two of them having sex with each other and other men and male vampires plenty of times, but it never describes it in terms of romantic attraction, or as a part of their identity).

What makes the pride parade my favorite moment, though, is what happens as the camera lingers on Guillermo. He initially seems humiliated and miserable, but as the parade goes on, you can see a smile start to take over his face. By the end of the episode, he’s waving the sparkler and bouncing along to the music. Finally happy with himself and proud of the label. In an episode that’s been all about callously and clumsily making a show of pride just to win inclusivity points, it makes a very sweet and even subtle point about how much it means to the participants to be able to be out and open and not afraid of looking ridiculous.

That kind of satire, mockery, or nihilism followed up with a bit of sentimentality or kindness is what elevates What We Do In The Shadows from an extremely funny series to a memorable and even important one. It asserts that you can be smart without being elitist, sentimental without being maudlin, goofy without being pointless, shocking without being shallow, and have a tone that’s all over the place, just as long as you’re funny enough.

1
Because it does not relent
2
Or is it something to do with lamps?

Top. Men.

Reconsidering the Indiana Jones movies through the male gaze of the male gays

Today I responded to a gag on Bluesky which said that it was insane to make the new Indiana Jones game first person, since a huge part of the appeal of Indiana Jones was looking at Harrison Ford shirtless with a whip.

“Ah yes ha ha I can relate to this as part of my shared experience as a gay man,” I thought as I nodded and smiled along in… wait hang on! Have I been wrong about the Indiana Jones franchise my entire life?!

Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of my top 5 favorite movies, easily, and is usually what I’ll say if you ask me point blank what my all-time favorite is. I’ve seen it an awful lot. I had the poster for Raiders on the wall of my bedroom, the one with Indy in the center, cracking his bullwhip, his shirt half open. I also had the teaser poster for Temple of Doom on my wall for a while, the one with Indy standing in an archway with half his shirt missing.

I never thought much about how much of the imagery of Indiana Jones is bare-chested. Actually, that’s a complete lie; I thought about it a lot. What I mean to say is that I never thought much about the implications of it.

After all, these are some of the most heterosexual movies ever made, right? Not like Roadhouse or Commando by trying so hard to prove that they’re heterosexual; the Indiana Jones movies always felt super-straight to me because they didn’t have anything to prove. These are action movies all about recreating a long-lost archetype of a Man’s Man from the early 20th century. Women want him; men want to be him — and if the connection weren’t obvious enough, they made it explicit by casting Sean Connery¹ as his dad. And even though the second movie started with a fabulous musical number, it felt less like a musical number than like a man going out of his way to look at his hot new girlfriend in a tight dress.

I’m so used to things being “queer-coded” — whether it’s secret messages hidden in a work by sly artists speaking to a subsection of their audience, or oblivious artists making art that queer people will spend the next several decades furiously re-contextualizing and reinterpreting. I always just assume by default that I’m watching or reading any work “the wrong way,” appreciating things that the filmmakers never intended.

But now that I think about it, I’m no longer sure it was unintentional. The thing that’s become abundantly clear is that the Indiana Jones movies are super horny, and they’re super horny exclusively for Indiana Jones. And although I’m sure they exist, I can’t personally recall ever hearing a woman name anything in the franchise as their favorite movie. But tons of men do. So we have a group of heterosexual directors, writers, and actors all working to make a film franchise for men that’s about how impossibly sexy the male lead character is.

That’s not to say that women don’t enjoy it, of course. I still remember seeing Raiders for the first time as a middle school birthday party. Our chaperone, a young woman in her 20s, was silent throughout, until the scene in which Indy gets off a submarine, punches out a Nazi, and takes his hat. At which point she said, out loud, “He’s so fine!”

I’d even say that the spark of the movies directly correlates to how sexy Harrison Ford can be. Crystal Skull has a lot of issues, but I think the bulk of it comes down to the feeling of being a kid watching your parents at a dinner party with a bunch of other grown-ups. And Dial of Destiny kind of drives the point home with its extended opening sequence saying “remember when Harrison Ford used to be impossibly hot?” I read an interview that said he insisted that he appear in his underwear after the extended flashback, to drive home the idea of how much Indy (and he) had aged. And I respect that a lot, especially for a movie that is primarily about regret and vainly wanting to turn back the clock. But it’s an entirely different vibe from the earlier movies.

None of this is at all unprecedented, either. I can still remember seeing an interview with Robert Conrad as a retrospective of The Wild Wild West, in which he made a joke about how the producers of the show were always putting him into impossibly tight pants.

My conclusion from all this is that I should be less hung up about target audiences and whether or not I fit. There is a long tradition in commercial entertainment in making money off of attractive people looking sexy and doing exciting things while looking sexy. It was happening long before anybody started over-analyzing it, and before anybody realized how much money you could make by having stuff explicitly marketed towards queer people with disposable income.

The entertainment industry has never cared whether I was watching stuff “the right way.” They only cared that I was watching it.

I kind of prefer to think that I wasn’t alone in some weird silo watching Indiana Jones cracking his whip at Nazis² and swooning that he was cracking that whip for me. Or even finding community from other gay kids whose formative movie-watching years were in the early 80s, like how I discovered so many other guys who vividly remember the scenes in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? when Eddie Valiant had his shirt off. That’s all fine and good, but it’s somehow even more comforting to think that all of us were part of an even larger community, transcending gender and orientation, all sharing the universal human experience of being super horny for Indiana Jones.

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Even though he’s cleverly cast against type
2
Or every character, male or female, in all of Bull Durham

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Six or Eight Thousand Years Ago

Two tunes with misunderstood lyrics about the cradle of civilization

I ain’t no student of ancient culture, but there’s one thing that I do know: The B-52’s didn’t do a ton of research when writing the song “Mesopotamia.”

But that’s kind of what the song is all about, and kind of why I love the band. They made songs about whatever weird shit they felt like: counterfeiting, driving in the south at night, odd beach encounters, how there are a lot of ruins in Mesopotamia.

Because we’re living in the future, Apple Music automatically showed me the lyrics as I was listening, and I realized I’ve had it wrong for 30 years. When Kate sings, “I know a neat excavation!” I had always heard it as “I know I need excavation,” which I’d always thought was some kind of weird horny double entendre. The real version is much more charming and in the spirit of the B-52s, of course.¹

Another lyric I always misheard was from “River Euphrates” by the Pixies. I thought they were just saying “ri-ri-ri-ri” over and over again for River Euphrates, much like Shaggy would say “gh-gh-gh-gh” for Ghosts. Apparently the real lyric is “Ride a tire down the River Euphrates.” Which is also much more charming than I’d thought. It generates a calming image of the Black Francis and Kim Deal tubing through the cradle of civilization while Fred Schneider and Kate Pierson call from the shore to come check out some neat pyramids.

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I don’t think they ever had any racy lyrics at all, did they? Apart from “Strobe Light” and “I’m gonna kiss your pineapple!!!”

Literacy 2024: Book 6: Poirot Investigates

A collection of short stories featuring Agatha Christie’s most famous detective.

Book
Poirot Investigates by Agatha Christie

Synopsis
A collection of short stories about Hercule Poirot’s various cases, all narrated by his friend Captain Hastings.

Pros

The variety of stories shows that Christie was a master at finding variation in a shared formula.
The stories don’t feel particularly rushed, and still manage to capture most of the characterization and personality of the full-length mysteries.
Often feels as if Christie didn’t consider the mystery aspect much of a challenge, and she was far more interested in the personalities of Poirot and Hastings.
No one would mistake this for a feminist work, but it does subtly reinforce the intelligence and capabilities of women while still staying mostly within its boundaries as classist, sexist, early 20th century England.
I always like it when Christie introduces elements of Egyptology and ancient Egyptian history into her stories, because it’s clear she dearly loves the subject.
There’s a delightful couple of afterwards written by Christie, talking about her love/hate relationship with Poirot.

Cons

Jarringly racist, in particular against the Chinese.
The gimmick doesn’t always work; a couple of the stories are entirely in the form of Poirot telling Hastings a story that had happened years previously, and the lack of immediacy makes it difficult to follow.
Some of the stories end abruptly.

Verdict
Light and mostly fun, especially good for establishing Poirot as a long-running character, with more presence than the full novel-length mysteries.

Side Note
My modest goal was to read 12 books this year, and I’m clearly not going to make it. It’s not been a great year, and maybe reading challenges are dumb?

Agatha the Irredeemable

Final (for now) thoughts on Agatha All Along. Spoilers for the entire series.

Agatha All Along ended a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve spent the time since then trying to figure out what exactly I thought of it.

My initial reaction was that I was a little disappointed. Midway through the season, it seemed like they suddenly decided they weren’t content to do another televised MCU installment, and they wanted to be putting out stuff for Emmy reels and best-of compilations. But I initially felt as if they’d managed to make all the plot threads fit together, but without the end result meaning much of anything.

The last two episodes were genuinely surprising. For WandaVision, the big “reveals” had been mostly figured out by fans of the comics early on in the season, so that series was a case of watching stuff we already knew was going to happen, but in a way that was so satisfying and fun that nobody really cared. I’d assumed that Agatha All Along was going to do the same, presenting some not-particularly challenging mysteries and let us all have fun pretending to be surprised. “Oh, she’s still under Wanda’s spell!” “Oh, that’s Wanda’s son Billy Kaplan/Wiccan!” “Oh, she’s the Marvel embodiment of Death!” “Her sudden outbursts are foreshadowing things that will happen later in the series!” I was perfectly satisfied with this level of engagement, only to get a double rug-pull in the last two episodes.

I hadn’t suspected at all that the Witches’ Road was Billy’s creation. I did expect that we’d meet a Great and Powerful Oz type character at the end, who had some connection to Rio, but hadn’t even considered the possibility that the entire premise of WandaVision was playing out again on a smaller scale. And it seemed kind of obvious that Agatha was lying about the road, and her experience with it in particular. But I’d thought it was going to be a simple case of undeserved bravado, claiming she’d been on it when she hadn’t. Or we’d see the rumor play out, where her previous trip on the road had presented a choice between the power she wanted (the Darkhold?) and her son. It never once occurred to me that the final episode would take agency back from Billy Kaplan and make the title of the series make sense! It was a really clever layering of surprises: he subconsciously created the road just like Wanda first created the Hex, but in the end, the instigator of the whole thing really was Agatha all along.

Things I Know to be True Right Now

Stray, unorganized thoughts while changing focus and priorities

It has been an absolutely beautiful day in my section of Los Angeles today. I went up to the roof for a while and enjoyed the sun and a very nice breeze, while appreciating the view around my house. Seeing mountains and palm trees all around is still such a novelty for me, and I hope I never get tired of it. There are two tall palm trees (which are perfectly framed by my office window) that have become a symbol of serenity for me.

I should’ve known after my experience with smoking, but giving up anything cold turkey just doesn’t work for me. So instead of being able to change my focus and priorities all at once, I should probably expect sporadic bursts of I Have A Take On Politics That I Must Share With The Internet.

I can’t know for sure, obviously, but I have a strong suspicion that many of the people I spent years aligning myself with online, who’d talk about equality and rejecting classism and capitalism, etc, are people who never talk to their Uber drivers.

That’s not purely a condemnation, by the way. I have a lot of scorn for hypocrites and snobs, but I also need to acknowledge that I’m out of touch with people. In the case of ride-sharing, even if I weren’t an introvert, I don’t think anybody doing their job should be obligated to make conversation if they don’t want to. And it’s inherently a deeply unfair situation, more than a taxi, because the company that doesn’t give them benefits still holds them accountable to driver ratings. You’re unlikely to get a candid conversation that will build bridges. But when I’ve been in a ride with a particularly gregarious driver, or an extroverted passenger, it’s been a reminder that I very rarely talk to people whose jobs and economic situations are different from my own.

Speaking of smoking: over the past few days, my brain keeps asking “What would it even matter?” if I had a cigarette. But I haven’t had one yet. And in the days since I last tried one and hated it, I haven’t been that interested in getting one. I’ve noticed I think of myself as a non-smoker now, too: whenever I do get the urge to have a cigarette, I think of it as a novelty, instead of going back to my default state of always having a pack on me. Plus the memory of my last one is still really gross. I have a ton of sympathy for people battling addictions.

While I was up on the roof today, I was reminded that I hardly ever go up there, and in fact have spent entire days without going outside. Worse, instead of being outside in the sun with a great view, I’m most often indoors on my phone looking at things that make me angry or sad, which I have no control over and no influence to do anything about. It drove home the fact that I’m not actually just being lazy and using social media or the news to procrastinate, as I’ve always assumed, but I’m actively choosing to look at it instead of doing something healthy.

I was reminded today that one of the best TV series of all time, The Good Place, ran from 2016 to 2020. It seems fitting for a series that was all about ethical behavior in a world that made ethics seem like an impossible luxury. The thing that I love most about the series was that it was so full of grace: never saccharine sentimentality, never compromising on its core values, but still understanding that there’s so much complexity in what makes a person good or bad.

Another thing I thought about while I was on my roof was how grateful I am to have that place to go to. It’s a luxury that I’ve been embarrassed to even talk about, since it often feels like I don’t deserve it. And if you spend too much time online, like I have, you’ll be constantly subjected to crucial ideas of societal injustice and inequity being used as a bludgeon, making a convincing case that you don’t deserve anything.

Today I reminded myself that although I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate, benefiting from the hard work of my parents, the incredible kindness of friends, and just plain good luck, that it’s not just luck and privilege. I’ve worked hard, made thoughtful choices, and set priorities. But the most important thing is the simplest: I’ve tried to be humble, kind, generous, and fair, always. And even when I haven’t succeeded, I’ve tried to be the kind of person that people want to work with. It’s always seemed like the bare minimum, but lately as I’ve been filled with despair at seeing arrogance, selfishness, and unkindness succeed, I’ve realized just how valuable humility and kindness can be.

Pedal to the Metal, Late to the Party

Here’s why the board game Heat: Pedal to the Metal is my new obsession

Heat: Pedal to the Medal is a board game published by Days of Wonder and developed by Sidekick Studio that came out in 2022. Each player controls a Grand Prix race car competing against up to 5 other racers to navigate the tight corners of a track, managing a hand of cards representing the car’s speed, the driver’s stress, and the engine’s heat.

And I am straight-up obsessed with it at the moment. It’s not just because it’s a lot of fun, but because it’s so elegant and clever. The core mechanic is so well-balanced, with every component having a clear cost-vs-benefit aspect that seems to generate an infinite number of interesting decisions from what should otherwise be the most tedious and repetitive process of going around a race track.

Even if you have no interest in auto racing, Heat is such a clever abstraction that it gives you a better idea of where the depth and complexity of the sport lie. Each track — there are four included in the base game — has its own peculiarities which can lead to surprisingly different strategies.

And then that core mechanic can be expanded on seemingly indefinitely, with a bunch of modules included in the base box, which players are free to mix and match. The game has been out long enough that the first expansion, Heat: Heavy Rain came out earlier this year, but I feel like I could play the base game dozens and dozens more times before needing to add anything else.

This is neither a tutorial nor a detailed review, but my list of the aspects of the game that impress me the most.

On Second Thought, Maybe Not

An appreciation for a few months of hope, and a resolution to keep my focus smaller and healthier from now on

The internet doesn’t need to know the details, but my reaction to the election results last night and this morning were enough — and were physiological enough — to convince me that I haven’t been keeping it together as well as I’d thought. And I’d thought I’d been doing pretty bad at it.

So while it’d be better if I could share something meaningful about resistance and defiance and strength and resolve in the face of evil, that’s just not me, realistically. For about as long as I can remember, people have been yelling that it’s selfish and irresponsible not to be deeply concerned about politics, and I’ve believed them. Social media has amplified that, blurring the line of what constitutes genuine activism, and loading us all with more stress than I think any of us are equipped to handle. Maybe it is selfish and irresponsible, but I prefer to think that it’s simply being more conscious of the tremendous gap between awareness and influence. It accomplishes nothing for any of us to be filled with concern and anxiety over something that we have no control over.

I don’t feel naive, or regret the couple of months I let myself feel hopeful because of the Harris/Walz campaign. I’m grateful for it. It was a great feeling, after years of feeling my hope just dwindle and flicker, to let it flare up again, to say this is what I believe in, this is what I value. They did so much to fight cynicism. And I believe it worked, for me at least, because what I’m feeling isn’t rooted in blame, or second-guessing, or suspicion. I got the chance to declare what I believe in. And there’s no longer any need to give other voters the benefit of the doubt — they clearly chose what they believe in, and they said that the things I value don’t matter.

Unlike 2016, when people like me tried to find sages online who could explain exactly what went wrong, where the Democrats failed, and what we could all do better next time, I don’t feel any need to look at post mortems. Vice President Harris and Governor Walz connected with people, and they had so much support that they’d raised over a billion dollars. And it somehow still wasn’t enough. The message there isn’t to try harder; it’s that the current system simply isn’t working.

And I hope I can finally just come to terms with the fact that I don’t have an answer, and I don’t have to have an opinion. I’ve spent the last few months formulating and clarifying my opinions and putting my money behind the people I want to support, and keeping up to date on the news because it was encouraging again, and it’s been at the expense of everything else in my life, that’s actually important.

My life was so much better before Twitter existed. I haven’t actually used Twitter in several years, but its influence has lingered on, not just in other social media, but in the way my brain is wired now to have a take on everything. I used to make things. I used to spend my free time working on projects, and enjoying movies and television and games and books, and writing about them on here to think in more depth about how they worked. I’ve seen several people today saying that times of crisis and uncertainty are when it’s most important to make art — I agree, although I think that overstates the inherent importance of art works by quite a lot.

There is value in the work, but the greatest value is the part of your life you dedicate to creating it. Pouring yourself into the creation of something simply because it can’t possibly exist otherwise, the diametric opposite of creating “content” to fill the space between ad slots.

So if nothing else, I’m artfully excusing myself from politics indefinitely, apart from giving help to people who are threatened, and concentrating on smaller, more local topics that can actually benefit from my efforts. And I’m pledging to drastically change my relationship with social media. Focusing only on what I control, like this blog; or the parts that actually constitute community.

For most of today, it’s felt like my light was finally extinguished, after years of sputtering in naive hopefulness. I’m resolving to change how I think about it: drawing in and hunkering down to re-ignite it, to be more protective of it, to keep it from being blown out for good.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Amen

Two tunes hopeful that we’re about to move forward

I’m writing this on Monday night, so I don’t yet know how the election will turn out. I’m confident enough that sanity and decency will win out, but after being blind-sided by Proposition 8 in 2008, and then the presidential election in 2016, I don’t trust people to do the right thing as much as I used to.

Whatever the outcome, though, there’s no blaming the Harris campaign. They’ve been working tirelessly to earn every vote they can, against attacks from all sides, and understanding they’re not just working against the GOP but against voter apathy and cynicism. They’ve been stunningly effective and positive, and I think they deserve a victory lap regardless.

If for nothing else, then for choosing “Freedom” by Beyoncé as the campaign song. Not just as a campaign slogan, not just for the significance of a powerful Black woman using the music of another powerful Black woman, but as an undeniable message that this campaign was different. Dragging America kicking and screaming into the 21st century, prying it out of the claws of desperate white Boomers if need be.

And since Harris has made her last speech of the campaign, her final argument and the summation of her message, it seems appropriate to pair it with “Amen,” the last track on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter.

It’s the companion to the starting track of that album, “American Requiem,” which sets up the album’s message: it’s about reclaiming her space as a musician and, more significantly, as an American. I’d initially took it as just a play on genre, Beyoncé insisting that she doesn’t need to be relegated to R&B, she can damn well make a country album if she wants to. But there’s more to it than that, as if the cover image of her wearing a red, white, and blue suit on horseback while waving an American flag didn’t make it obvious. The idea is pretty clear: you don’t own this country, you don’t get to tell me whether I belong or not.

That’s an even more perfect fit for the Harris campaign and what makes it feel so exciting to me. For as long as I’ve been alive, we’ve had people appointing themselves to be the arbiters of who does and doesn’t belong where. Wrapping themselves in American flags, calling themselves “patriots,” shamelessly declaring that they’re the “real” Americans, acting as if everyone else is here by their grace alone. Honestly, all that Trump and Vance have done is taken that tired old idea and made it explicit. We’ve been hearing it so long, in fact, that people can wave signs reading “Mass Deportations Now,” given to them by the GOP at the Republican National Convention, and it barely got a blip of interest from the media. Promises of ethnic cleansing treated with such a lack of interest or alarm, you’d think it was yet another mass murder of children and teachers at a school.

This campaign has been all about taking back the things that have been stolen by the Republicans from Reagan onward: patriotism; belief in the ideal of America; accepting that the ideal has never been perfect, but that striving for it is the entire point; and hearing “anyone can grow up to be President of the United States” as aspirational, instead of a dire warning of the lack of safeguards in our election system.

“Amen” ends with lines repeated from “American Requiem,” and I think they’re perfect: “Them old ideas are buried here. Amen.”