Reading

Entry tags:

video games encourage magic mushroom use

Game: Kentucky Route Zero

Kentucky Route Zero is a creative and thoughtful interactive story about debt, grief, and the relentless march of capitalism, but also creation, repair, and community. There are enough dialogue choices that I felt like I was actually engaging with the characters, who all have their own thing going on, and you're even given some choices about who you can hang out with or where you go next. Some choices will give you a deeper engagement with the story and some just add further texture to this world.

Because it's a story more than a game, you can explore the environment and talk to the people you meet and accomplish tasks you're assigned, but it generally plays out the same regardless of your choices. There aren't any puzzles to solve except for the mystery of wtf is going on, and you'll do most of that on your own time.

The stylized art contributes to the mystery because you'll want to know more, but can't. You view this world from a set distance and because you can't zoom in to inspect the details, there's a kind of remove to it, like you're in a movie and just have to go where it takes you. It's best experienced in a dark room because it's literally too dark to see if there's any light around you.

The story is messy, with the past sliding through the present, and many questions are left unanswered as you attempt to deliver some antiques to an address you can't find. You start out with Conway, a big rectangle of a man, and his old dog, who you can name Blue or Homer—I went with Homer—and along the way you meet people who join you and bring their talents and troubles with them.

The dialogue between the characters slowly reveals their histories and concerns, and at times you can even talk to the dog as a way to talk yourself through what you're thinking. The dog doesn't talk back, but all the other characters have distinct personalities, and I felt like I was building real conversations—and relationships—between them through my choices.

However, I had a real problem with something that happened about halfway through the game that made me feel used, and it colored the rest of the play for me. I could have just stopped there, at the end, and parted with it unhappy, but I couldn't shake the feeling I was missing something and so the next night I started it up again and gave it a second chance, with Blue.

I still have a big issue with that aspect of the game (it involves alcohol, an alcoholic, and a choice that isn't a choice), but my second playthrough picked up a lot of things I didn't see the first time, and I'm glad I gave it a second try. It's definitely a unique story, filled with wondrous things.

Recommended, probably, if you like worldbuilding, games with low stakes—you can't really make mistakes here, though I somehow managed—interesting characters, found family, and a world that's punched through with mysteries: abandoned mines, hidden caves, a moldy computer, an underground river, and of course the secret highway—Kentucky Route Zero.

I've got content notes down below, feel free to ask me for more details. I played this on my Android tablet through my Netflix subscription.

Now for my chronological thoughts as I was playing. Vague spoilers for the game throughout.

( Homer )

( Blue )

Contains: (metaphorical) amputation (maybe); alcohol and alcoholism; debt, foreclosure; dementia and the impending loss of an old friend; repeated references to the death of a child; dead horses, on screen; an old dog who has seen better days but keeps on seeing them; some sounds (mainly discordant electronic ones) made me very anxious, but there's nothing abrupt, loud, or jump-scary.

Accessibility: The game has white text on a black background, which you can't change, but you can change the size of the text and remove some glitch effects. You also can control FPS on the video and turn on captions for the audio.

Entry tags:

book report

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander

Published in 2010, updated with a new preface in 2020, and still very much worth reading in 2025. As Alexander says in the new preface:

In many respects, the core thesis of this book is more relevant today than it was ten years ago. It is now easier to see the patterns, the cycles, the predictable rhetoric, and the ways in which systems of racial and social control adapt, morph, rebound, and are reborn.

Alexander argues that the criminal justice system, specifically through the War on Drugs, perpetuates a racial hierarchy that's replaced Jim Crow as the dominant system of control over people—especially men—of color, just as Jim Crow once emerged to perform many of the same functions as slavery.

She briefly reviews the history of racialized social control in the United states, describes the structure of mass incarceration with a focus on the War on Drugs, looks at the role of race in the U.S. criminal justice system, considers how the caste system operates once people are released from prison, explores the many parallels between mass incarceration and Jim Crow, and reflects on what acknowledging the presence of the New Jim Crow means for the future of civil rights advocacy.

It's a moving, well-developed argument written in plain language, and if you're up for it here in the midst of the ever increasing horrors, I highly recommend it. Be sure to get the 10th Anniversary Edition.

AWS outage

DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.

Entry tags:

book report

The Raven Boys: The Graphic Novel, by Stephanie Williams

The Raven Boys: The Graphic Novel, adapted from Maggie Stiefvater's book by Stephanie Williams, illustrated by Sas Milledge with colors by Abel Ko:

The dialogue in this adaptation is faithful to the novel, but perhaps too faithful. I think Williams missed an opportunity to take some of the novel's internal reflection and transform it into dialogue. Like it would have been easy, and told us a lot about both of them, to have Blue lean over to a coworker and mutter, "Check out President Cellphone," when Gansey first walks into Nino's.

That means this is missing a lot of the character work that you get in the novel, like Gansey's utter devotion to the Pig (which I don't think is ever called by name here?). Blue's initial disgust for Gansey also seems much weaker. Oddly, 300 Fox Way is exactly as empty as the novel makes it, with only the three main psychics, and Blue and Calla (briefly) present on the page. That's one thing that would have been easy to show in this visual format, just fill the panels with all those aunts and cousins Blue swears are in the house but who never seem to impact much of anything except the state of the kitchen sink. (Don't tell me the house is crowded and then not show me constant fighting over who gets to use the bathroom. This bothers me every time I read the book.)(Though this does fix Blue's age to match the rest of the series, and I can't tell you how happy I was that her explanation to Adam got cut off before she could say "young.")

As an adaptation, it feels watered down, and I can't judge it as a standalone graphic novel because I've read the book so many times I brought all that with me and also missed the things it left out. Like Gansey's Topsiders, and Blue's weird clothes, and Adam's Coke shirt. Not that any of these things are important on their own, but they tell us something about the characters. That Gansey looks like he came out of a yachting magazine and has about the same amount of understanding about the real world as if he did, and how Blue's punk do-it-yourself ethos applies not just to her clothing and her room, but her approach to life, and that for the psychics, Adam, in that crowd of Raven Boys, is at first only as memorable as the slogan on his t-shirt. The detailed artwork is gorgeous, however, especially the lush colors of Cabeswater, and Ronan's back tattoo is fucking amazing, and I support the decision to make Blue and her family Hispanic because this is a very white story otherwise.

So for me, this is a nice effort, and a pleasant read, and it gets a lot right, but mostly it just made me want to read the book again, as, inevitably, all graphic novel adaptations do. But it might be perfect for reluctant readers or those who prefer graphic novels.

Contains: child abuse and domestic violence; wasps; reference to past suicide attempt; the text is small, thin, and faint enough that it's difficult to read in print.

Entry tags:

queen mab + her electric sheep

a dream based on two real life events, thirty years apart

I was at my desk using the old computer my uncle sent me back in the 90s, typing away, but the keys on keyboard required a lot of force and were hard to use, so I picked up the keyboard to see what kind of cord it had, thinking maybe I could get a new keyboard and plug it in, but the cord wasn't attached to the computer! But it still worked! DUN DUN DUN.

(This dream is based on: When I was in high school, my computery uncle sent me a used Tandy something or other (Tandy 1000, maybe? it had, among other things, a word processing program (DeskMate?) and Sid Meier's Civilization I on it and came with absolutely no documentation), and yesterday one of the keys on my dad's Chromebook was sticky. Now there are two computers that have almost nothing in common.)

((Also, I'm getting better at knowing, emotionally, that the 90s weren't "ten years" ago, but I'm still not going back far enough. My original estimate was twenty years, but no that was literally thirty years ago, dawg.))