mystery

Observation (2019/2020)

The chances of me nabbing a PS5 any time soon are fairly nonexistent, so despite the fact I have a chunk of previous-gen games floating around in my to-finish pile, I’ve been working through some of the titles included in Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription. (It came with my console, and fuck it, why not? It meant I didn’t have to buy that Blair Witch game.)

Thankfully, my most recent dip into the pool-o-games features enough creepy narrative to keep me entertained for its relatively short runtime. Yeah, compared to a Yakuza game, everything is relatively short, but still: for about 10–12 hours, Observation kept me pretty intrigued.

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Book review: The Night Ocean

The Night OceanThe Night Ocean by Paul La Farge.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars.

Remember ole H.P. Lovecraft? He’s the guy who’s incredibly influential – cosmic horror as we know it really came about because of him – despite being a faintly awful writer. I mean it: I dig a lot of his work, but his writing is stilted and often ludicrous.

The worst mistake you can make, Kroeber taught, is to see another person through the lens of your prejudices. And the second-worst mistake is to think you aren’t looking through the lens of your prejudices.

As befits a misanthropic nihilist, he was also pretty mad racist – and not a lover of jazz – though to mention this seems to attract its fair share of pitchforks. (This is a pretty great article, now deleted, about the topic.) (more…)