The Final Fantasy XIV Diaries, Entry #2: Little Copse Of Horrors

     A NEW DAY HAS DAWNED, and with it my chance to, y'know, actually play the game, having survived the account-creation crucible. So I've got my HUD under control, I'm attuned to the Big Blue Go-There Rock, I'm a registered goddamn adventurer, and it's time to Archer the shit out of this thing.

"Adventurers! That's how they do, you know.

Just ride chocobos around, listening to Mage's Ballad and cheesing all the microchus!"

    I'm given to understand that FFXIV is an unusual example of its genre for a number of reasons; its troubled launch, the uncommonly wholesome and helpful nature of its community, and the quality and quantity of its ongoing development and polishing, the last of which has resulted in a game that, I don't mind telling you, is fucking gorgeous.

Maybe it's just being an inmate of Arizona but 

goddamn, I want want to go to there

    And admittedly part of that is playing it on a PS4, which I recommend for a first-time player like myself not only because it's rill rill pretty and you don't need to worry about how many big strong muscles your computer can make and how fast it can flex them, as is my understanding, but because it's way less intimidating to just get used to a new controller-scheme like in any other game, and just runnin' around Gridania like a big ol' dumdum--jumpin' and such--is so much better than what I have to assume is either a point-and-click setup or ASWD dealie.

    My bow freshly strung, my attacks hotkeyed, my tail so so fluffy, I begin to adventure in earnest which, I quickly come to understand, involves me doing every single menial task, chore and errand the citizens of Gridania can cook up for me. And honestly, I'm not even mad about it; the city is beautiful and super fun to explore but is enormous and filled with a ton of places I'll invariably need to revisit down the line, and these fetch, delivery, subpoena, kill, escort, notarization, and collection quests crisscrossing the map are actually a pretty subtle, effective way to learn the map and acquaint myself with the million guilds, shops, NPCs and similar. Also, it doesn't hurt that unlike most sidequests in games, these offer a really hefty and progressionally-useful chunk of EXP each in addition to cash and, frequently, a selection of equipment from which one can choose based on one's build and playstyle.

    It was in the execution of one of these quests that I, through no fault of my innocent blameless furry-eared own, stumbled into an encounter for which I was HILARIOUSLY underleveled and felt the cold, slurpy shadow of my VERY DOOM upon me, for I am beset by a gargantuan and Very Bad Planto called Matagaiai, an H.R. Giegeresque bundle of roots that don't give a hoot, I am quickly and painfully assured; whipulations and chompenings and poison plant-gasses ensue, and the Eorzean sun(s???) prepares to set blood-red on the Brief Adventuring Career of Den Jaymark. When suddenly, I SHIT THE GENTLE READER NOT, a choir of heroes descends from the celestial sphere upon the backs of war-clad chocobos, and they proceed--not impeded overmuch, one hopes, by my own humble contribution of some baby arrows in the fuckin' thing's stamen and some orange slices and Capri Sun I happened to bring--to ABSOLUTELY ANNIHILATE THIS PLANT'S ASS. It was magical! And I leveled! And then, as quickly, majestically and mysteriously as they arrived, they hopped aboard their resplendent technicolor battle-birdums and were gone.

Hey Matagaigai? Fuck you, buddy.

    I tried to make use of the game's gesture-system to thank them but all that remained as evidence of their deeds were a handful of feathers swirling on the chlorophyll-scented mist. It was only by virtue of my quick thinking and learning the chat-log system against my will that I was able to find the names of the champions to whom I owed my life or whatever, I'll be honest, I still don't know what happens when you die in this game because I'm scared to find out. AND SO I WILL THANK THEM HERE: Choccy, Agro, Mira Cephai and Cyline Black, I'm not entirely sure those are your names and not the names of your chocobos but frankly their approval means more to me, you get it.

    I had heard tell of the wholesome and friendly nature of the game, but now I had proof: I was among good people, lizard-people, cat-people, and etc. I was one of them now. I was an Adventurer.

    Oh also I found a magic sword in a stump and met a pair of mysterious and improbably-clad kinda science-types and got a vision from one or more gods and apparently it turns out I can maybe see into the past, which is important because nobody can remember anything from before or just after the world-shattering cataclysm that ushered in the present era some years ago? But honestly: that pales in comparison to friendly strangers helping me conquer a challenge I shouldn't have been anywhere near able to.

I should warn you, I go to sleep

November 2020 Books Read Standouts: The Only Good Indians/Conan: Battle For The Serpent Crown

The Only Good Indian - Stephen Graham Jones

     Oh look, it's the second time in a row Stephen Graham Jones has shown up! WHAT A COMPLETELY COINCIDENTAL CRAZY RANDOM HAPPENSTANCE. I had no idea this was going to happen!

    Night of the Mannequins was a really good introduction to Jones and his way, but odds are if you've heard of him recently it's because of The Only Good Indians catapulting him onto the mainstream literary stage, and cousin ALL of the good things you've heard are well-deserved and well-true! So true. HORRIFYINGLY true.

    Jones is a Native author, and in truth I haven't read widely enough in his work yet to know if it's regularly from that perspective, but this certainly is and without meaning to sound like a paternalist garbage white guy, he manages to draw from that and make the storytelling language informed by his heritage different and spooky and mysterious because it's a horror story, not because that experience and point of view are alien or inaccessible or incomprehensible to a non-Native reader. You don't have to be an alcoholic to be able to relate to Jack Torrence in The Shining or have cancer to feel for Walter White in Breaking Bad (before certain plot and character developments), and you don't have to be Blackfeet to understand Lewis and his pals desperately trying to escape the shadow of a choice they made one snowy day a decade ago, when they were all young and stupid and were sure that they would live forever, but somehow not quite long enough for the consequences to catch up with them.
    If you've only got time for the elevator pitch, here: ten years ago this Last Saturday Before Thanksgiving, four young Blackfeet men went hunting elk, where they knew full well they weren't allowed to, and they made a terrible, stupid decision that forms the first link in a chain of tragedy that will pull them back into the past one horrible, bloody hoofprint at a time. It's a paranoid, sad, sweet, unexpectedly hilarious and profoundly spooky tale of atonement and parenthood and a people attempting to find their way when their place in the world was taken from them and Nature Taking Revenge (Maybe), and without spoiling anything I'll say that if I had read this prior to reading Night of the Mannequins I would've made some very different, very incorrect assumptions about the nature of the story I was reading.
    Like look I could spend another 400 words telling you why if you read one new book in 2021 it should be this one, but I'll leave it at this: I finished The Only Good Indians and immediately asked my wife if I could read it to her at bedtime. If it's good enough for her, beloved reader, it's good enough for you, because she, love her though I do, refers to almost all things as being "not even that good" and she loved this.

Score: 10/10 Bottles Of Sprite With A Chance To Win Under The Cap

Conan: Battle For The Serpent Crown

    I gotta level with you all, friends and neighbors: I am bummed in the utmost to report that I did not like this book! And it is a puzzlement; I love Saladin Ahmed, I loved his novel Throne of the Crescent Moon before I even knew he wrote comics, I love his runs on Miles Morales, Black Bolt and Magnificent Miss Marvel! And by Crom do I love me some Conan, the Marvel and the Dark Horse! This combination should have worked wonderfully and it did not, at least not for me. 

    Upshot: Conan finds himself in Las Vegas he knows not how, and gets caught up in a big ol' Marvel-ass adventure with a cast that rotates every issue, featuring Black Panther, Namor the Sub-Mariner, newcomer Nyla, and Mefrigginphisto in a struggle for the fate of the titular Snakeycircle. It's a Very Good Circle, you guys! Everybody wants it for their serpentine spirographs, lest their mamas' fridges like blank and bereft. Cue the fracas-conga.
    I'm sorry to say it's no good for this citizen! And I think I know why: part of the appeal to me of Conan, the half of this equation to which I am more attached by a significant margin, is that he's got no time for bullshit and will happily slice in half any man, monstro, magic or Martian that gets in his way. He's low-fantasy, which naturally requires that the foes and dangers he faces have to be not necessarily mundane, but of the same power-sphere, if not power-level. He can get the better of an ancient alien security system or eldritch critter enshrined in a mad cult's temple because, I reiterate, those problems can be chopped in half. Know what can't be chopped in half? MEPHISTO, WHO IS LITERALLY THE ACTUAL DEVIL IN MARVEL COSMOLOGY. So, one might reasonably ask "What is Conan, who trod the jeweled thrones of the earth beneath his sandaled feet but is very definitely just a mortal, non-magical human man, good for in this situation?" The answer: NOT MUCH, GANG.
    I don't like to be unkind, for I am a Common Wuss, and there were things to like about this series; for me, most of them were "Conan is unfazed by modern technology and customs and relies on punching, the universal language". I could read that shit all day. Maybe for someone who was more excited about the Marvel stuff than the Conan stuff this would've been a better experience, but for me these are just two great tastes that taste better on their own. Your mileage may vary, naturally, and I mean no disrespect to the artists and writer, but for my part I'm gonna stay out of of town until the Son of Cimmeria is no longer the Barbarian In Residence at Thulsa Doom's Palace Las Vegas.

Score: 5/10 Slot Machines With Beefy Fist-Holes Through Them

I nearly blew right by, in my hurry to the subway

October 2020 Books Read Standouts: Night Of The Mannequins/Batman - White Knight

Prose: Night of the Mannequins - Stephen Graham Jones

    Look, I have never let being late to a party prevent me from making it my new home and inviting a few other people over without the host's consent, and so it is with Stephen Graham Jones, my new favorite horror author about whom I simply will not shut up.

"Have you ever thought about like, what if humans were the real monst--oh you just recently started to?"

    Night of the Mannequins is pretty much the perfect bite of the Jonesburger where you get a little bit of everything with no crust and a minimum of lettuce: genuine human pathos, a writing style that's so natural and hilarious it feels like he's cheating, growing paranoia from an increasingly unreliable narrator and sheer, profound horror at a situation that may or may not be what it seems, and either way you are screwed.
    As with several of his books there's really no way to give a summary (one that would be useful, anyway) without spoiling the whole thing, so I'll just say this: one magical summer, a group of friends find a mannequin in his natural environment: the swamp. They love him and spend every minute of vacation with him, but as children will do, they return to school and grow up and move on and forget about him. But he doesn't forget about them. And soon they'll remember their old pal, and they will never, ever forget him again.
    This was the first of Jones' books I'd ever read, and it was a powerful (but manageably mid-sized) introduction to an author who has become a preorder-automatically, buy-for-friends, re-read regularly part of my life. Whether you're looking for a new obsession from a Native author with a deep back-catalog to dive into, or a fairly quick read unlike anything you've experienced before, or just an author who tweets incessantly about slasher movies and how he accidentally got his blood all over everything this time, Jones is for you and Night of the Mannequins is maybe the perfect place to start before you dig in on meatier fare like The Only Good Indians and the upcoming My Heart is a Chainsaw, for an advanced reader copy of which I lobbied and was denied and I don't even care, I just wanted to read it sooner, I still preordered that bad boy and will be diving into it on day one.

Score: 8.5/10 Bags Of Miracle-Gro With An Inhumanly Giant Bite Taken Out Of The Side

    

 

Graphic: Batman: White Knight

    Look, we've all read pretty much all the "What if" Batman stories in one form or another, right?
    Batman is a character defined not by his abilities but by his limits, and those limits determine the kinds of stories he can be used to tell, so there's ultimately kind of a limited roster even in a storytelling industry that runs on whatever bonkers concept they can get away with publishing that week. So we've all seen the Big Event comics that were supposed to change everything forever: What if Batman wasn't a tortured crusader but a violent extremist who causes more damage than he prevents. What if the Joker went sane. What if Batman killed somebody. What if Arkham held a terrible secret. What if Batman had to fight Superman. What if the Waynes weren't murdered. What if the Joker died. What if Gotham finally said enough of this bullshit, hitched up its britches and kicked both their asses. All of these are worn smooth and familiar by the rock-tumbler of time through which a character is put when they've been around for 80 years, and so the Batman game has become not can we tell a new story (because the answer is no), but how can we take these stories and use them in a new way? And admittedly I am mere an amateur Batmanologist but I'm fairly confident I've been through enough Loebs & Sales, Kings, Morrisons and Moores to feel pretty sure we're looking at a refreshingly original combination of comfortable ingredients.
    The upshot: Batman, already causing millions in infrastructure damage on a nightly basis with his roof-hopping tank, already endangering civilians left and right to the point that Batgirl and whichever Robin is on the schedule this week have to actively protect them from him, has finally gone too far. After one joy-buzzer and squirting-flower too many, he corners the Joker in a pharmaceutical warehouse and proceeds to stuff several after-school specials' worth of uncrazy-pills down the Joker's craw, physically choking his airway with antipsychotics until the laughter is just muffled gagging. It is deeply, genuinely upsetting. And then it gets worse, because the Gotham citizenry have been catching the whole thing on their phones, and the public is finally committed to holding Batman accountable for his actions, especially when the Joker wakes up, apparently sane, and immediately sets about proving that he can fix Gotham's problems better than a vigilante who goes around beating up the mentally ill. It's, uh--it's a bad day over at the Wayne estate, is what, and it's only gonna get worse when the sun goes down.
    White Knight is a really great Batman story and a really great comic; special mention goes to its active, quite literal takedown of Hypersexualized Consumptive Cheerleader Harley and the return of Dr. Harleen Quinzel, Ph-goddamned-D and also criminal, who was received so well she got her own spinoff limited series, and my brother in law was kind enough to send me a first-run #1 which has remained safely in its bag and board, and which I look forward to reading it as soon as the trade drops on ComiXology, as is my custom. It also has a sequel miniseries, Curse of the White Night, which I liked tremendously against my will, and a yet-to-be-announced third and final title rounding out the White Knight trilogy, although depending on how well Batman: The White Knight Presents Harley Quinn is received there's been substantial chatter about the author, Sean Murphy, being given room to develop more of his own shared-world, Batman-adjacent stories.

Score: 9/10 Drinks That Have Been Left Out Too Long, Look, They've Got Dust In Them

crazy sunshine

The Final Fantasy XIV Diaries, Entry #1: I, Catboi

The Final Fantasy XIV Diaries, Entry #1: I, Catboi

    I fell back on my couch exhausted, my hands become unto fossils, sculptures of bone in the shape of a DualShock controller. I consider myself a seasoned and experienced gamer, capable of rising to any challenge, but I had not been prepared for what I met with when I ventured into Eorzea. After forty minutes of tooth-cracking, bloody-minded struggle, making use of every tool, skill and low-down dirty fuckin' trick I'd learned in my gaming career, I had taken almost as much damage as I gave, but my foe lay split open before me, my prize spilling out of it like jewels in the moonlight: I had finally succeeded in creating my FFXIV free trial account.

    What would you like?, the game asked. Balanced stats? Big ol' muscles and blue skin? Or a long fluffy tail and Very Good Ears? And so, alea iacta est: A Miqo'te Is You. Mrrow, etc.

    I see no thiefy-type option, my go-to in most games for the damage output, lock-and-pocketpickery, and bitchin' bandanas, and so I am become an Archer, cobbling together a story that my guy is an archaeologist, scouring the world for ancient relics, lost technology and DVD boxed sets of sitcoms that have aged poorly due to racism. I make him look as much like me as the options will allow, name him Den Jaymark, and we set off to shape his destiny, at which point the game says lolnope, you're gonna hang out in a a wagon for a while with an old man who notices when a wine bottle is empty but not when it literally floats in front of him and also the two main characters of NieR: Automata. After a momentary meet with an invisible, mischievous moogle, Sue the T-Rex rolls on her random encounter table and we are shortly thereafter delivered, covered in brigand-blood, to a verdant, sylvan glade that doesn't resemble Lothlorien or Rivendell in the slightmost. 

An elven maid there was of old, a shining star of day

"Miss not the 11 o'clock checkout", she warned, "Or be charged for another night's stay."

    Here we are met with Madame--I mean Mother Miounne, who inducts us into the adventuring guild and runs the attached inn and definitely does not operate a house of negotiable affection under its eaves.

"The in-room mirror tells of things not yet passed, things that were and things that are,"

"I didn't use that, what's this 10-gil charge?" 

"The gysahl-seasoned kupo nuts you took from the minibar."

    Okay so now it's adventures, right? Please let it be adventures now. And: kinda, because I am thrown immediately and without life preserver into the path of an oncoming COMPLETELY OVERWHELMING UI AND HUD SCHEME, and forced to struggle for my very survival.
    Now admittedly, part of this is never having played an MMO before and therefore having literally no grounding in the visual and interface language the genre has had two decades to develop and in which it expects a certain level of fluency on the part of the player. What am cooldown? How DPS? Wherefore, aggro?

In FFXIV I'm finally free to live out my greatest fantasy:
Having a green question-mark for a head.

    Once I'd gotten a handle on Popup-Quest-Alert Hoarder Simulator 2021 up there, I futzed around some, figured out how to pare some stuff down in the settings (no, I don't need more than 3 tasks displaying at once, no, I don't need to know which server I'm on ((???)), no, I don't need to see my item grid) and after maybe a half hour began to realize that much of what initially felt like inundation with options and commands and input-structures is actually designed to save me as much time and inconvenience as possible; does it clutter the screen some to have a palette dedicated to my equipped attacks that I can press R1 to flip over to a series of options relating to my inventory? Yes, but training my fingers to know that when I want to see my armory they just have to go R1-R2-Triangle is a hell of a lot easier and so much faster than stopping, pausing, and finding my way through the literal dozens of menu options manually before finally arriving at my inventory, by which time I would likely have forgotten what I wanted in there.
    There is, of course, the argument to be made that maybe building the menu-navigation architecture to not be so crowded and labyrinthine that you have to offer a set of shortcuts could've been a way to go, but once I stopped fighting it and realized that everything I was looking at was designed to save me time and effort and increase my efficiency if I would only let it, my experience with the game immediately improved. I'm not normally an efficiency-hound, but I'm super grateful for these shortcuts that rely on muscle memory instead of active memory because this is a game that I'm theoretically going to be playing for hundreds of hours, and if it takes even five seconds to get to my inventory or whatever the long way, that shit is going to add up to hours of my extremely limited time on this planet, so I really appreciate quality of life implementations like that. Also I'm well aware that this is a conversation the MMO community probably started, came to a consensus on and declared closed within the first two weeks of World of Warcraft coming online, but I'm in uncharted waters here, learning a lot of things the hard way, and this was a great example in why I should trust the game and, perhaps just as importantly, trust the other players.

But that's a story for next time.

 

I made a new cast of the death-mask that's gonna cover my face

September 2020 Books Read Standouts: Harrow The Ninth/Slaughterhouse-Five

The Locked Tomb Trilogy, Vol. 2: Harrow the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir 

    Ohhhhhhh this spooky bitch and her sepulchral ways! Harrowhark Nonagesimus is back and we all have to live with it, and I for one give thanks to the That Which Lies In The Tomb, lest it wake and show me why I should've been content with mere dick jokes in space. This is, as you'll have gathered, the continuation of what began with Gideon the Ninth, and is more of the same in a good way but also completely different??? Harrow covers mmmmmmost? of the events of the first book from her perspective in a somewhat condensed fashion, but also flashes forwards and backwards (and, I am not making this up, sideways), and the majority of the book is deeply, frustratingly confusing until The Bit At The End That Makes It All Make Sense, not unlike one of Gregory McDonald's Fletch novels or The Sixth Sense; I'm sure when Alecto the Ninth comes out (currently projected for 2022 ((haha WHAT that's not a real year)) but who knows what Pandemic Publishing looks like) I'll do a run-up of the first two and it will be an entirely different and probably much better experience, but we don't award points for "It's better the second time" round THESE parts, pardner. Take that New Game+ bullshit somewhere else, he said, knowing his own weakness and how much fun it was gonna be.
    That said it's still a great read if you're already invested, as it's reasonable to assume you would be if you're reading the second entry in a trilogy, and due to the stark differences in the protagonists' personalities and viewpoints you really do feel like you're seeing the same world through a different set of eyes: Gideon (the person and the book) was interested in swords and dick jokes and irritating her frenemy with both and, actually, being a deeply broken, sad person inside; Harrow (book and person) is interested in worldbuilding and bone-magic and the horrifying theology underpinning the origins of humanity's God-Emperor and the Resurrection Beasts from which he seeks to protect us at any cost and, actually, being a deeply anxious, lonely person inside. It offers 150% of your recommended daily dose of Vitamin Feels.
    Ultimately it's a...complicated, clunky experience; there are times when I literally did not understand what I was reading word-to-word and times I was very frustrated by things that gleefully told me oh, you'll understand me...in 300 pages, when it's far too late to do anything about it. But it's funny as fuck, full of fascinating ideas and expertly-executed story-beats written as sharply as anything Griddle would wield or Harrow would sprout from her awful carapace, and like its predecessor forced me to enjoy several things I normally don't, such as space opera, sci-fantasy and, in this case, a coffeeshop AU for a chapter, apparently.

Score: 8/10 None Houses With Left Grief

Slaughterhouse-Five, Or: The Children's Crusade

    I love Ryan North! And specifically his work on comics! I also love Vonnegut writ large! What could go wrong?
    As it turns out, not much. Slaughterhouse-Five is a perfectly cromulent graphic adaptation of the Billy Pilgrimage through time and space. Sadly it's one of those adaptations that's almost too faithful, like the movies of John Dies At The End, No Country For Old Men, Odd Thomas or House of Sand and Fog; if you're familiar with one and experience the other it's like "Yeah, I definitely read/watched this and yeah, this is pretty much what that was like."
    It's not an inherently bad thing! North's writing is as sharp and touching as ever (to the extent, being an adaptation, that it's his writing, and I say that with no disrespect) and artist Albert Monteys makes use of a low-pressure art style perfectly conducive to the wandersome, melancholy nature of the story. There's just...not really a lot else to say about it; it's not enough of the book that you could read it instead for class, and it's enough of a comic to stand on its own but wouldn't win any awards for doing so. I slammed Preorder on that bad boy because I'm an unrepentant North fanboy and Vonnegenthusiast, and I enjoyed it. You probably would too! End of review.

Score: 7.5/10 Lives Constructed From Things Found In Gift Shops

all of the gates are open, all of the charges dropped

The Final Fantasy XIV Diaries, Entry #0: Bravely Disappointment

The Final Fantasy XIV Diaries, Entry #0: Bravely Disappointment   

 February 26, 2021; the day after my 32nd birthday.

    We once again had a president that, for his many flaws, did not retweet white supremacists and incite lethal, treasonous riots. Covid vaccine production, long-stalled to own the libs somehow, was finally ramping up. For the first time in as long as we could remember, the light at the end of the tunnel did not, upon closer inspection, transpire to be a giant anglerfish's lure, tempting us to our fangly doom like a luminous undersea gumdrop. I booted up my Switch, for the preordered day had arrived, and I slammed that icon like no Whammy in the world could touch me.

    But then, just when we thought we had left the darkest timeline, the unthinkable occurred: we were betrayed, by something we had all taken not just for granted, but as such a given that we had begun to build the next steps of our lives around it, like in that Taylor Swift song she clearly recorded at 3AM after watching The Great Gatsby half a dozen times in a row. No one could've seen it coming. No one could've prepared.

    Bravely Default II sucked, and my hope went dark, like a Crystal whose vestal had failed a button-mashing minigame, and so failed the world.

    Now, it's not a bad game, is in fact as competently made and well-polished as any Squenix offering, but whether something is good has little to do with its enjoyability. Con Air, for example, is definitely not a good movie but most emphatically does not suck, and in fact it fucking rules; Tenet, meanwhile, is a masterpiece of technical filmmaking but I would pay $12.99 right now to undo my $6.99 Amazon rental and get those two and a half hours of my life back, because Tenet sucked.
    Maybe it was my fault; maybe my memories of playing the BDII demo in the last days of normalcy before we'd ever heard the word "Covid" put a bloom upon the rose that could not be reproduced; maybe I expected too much of one JRPG, hoping it would rouse my heart and my life back to its feet as the world appeared to be restarting; maybe I'll come back to it in a year and fall in love, like how I was wrong as hell about not liking garlic all these years. I dunno, maybe the game just sucks, something might not actually be my fault for once.

    Regardless, I found myself stalled: here I was, primed for a game of an exceedingly specific kind, all Dressphered up and nowhere to go, and it was in this desperation and dissatisfaction with my long-awaited fix that I turned, perhaps inevitably, to the Hard Stuff: I started a free trial of Final Fantasy XIV.

    I’ve been, to use the technical term, an entire metric slut for Final Fantasy for longer than I haven’t, having at this point sunk more hours into every mainline game (except the onlines) and many of the spin-offs than I have into my bachelor’s degree, but my essential nature prevented me from venturing into the online waters: I had never played an MMO, or any kind of online game outside the odd ill-advised Borderlands 2 or Apex Legend jaunt with a pal whose Persuasion roll outweighed their Insight, and I was both bewildered and intimidated by the prospect.
    For me, video games are for playing alone in your room at 3 in the morning, jacked out of your mind on SoBe, Queen’s Greatest Hits in your earphones, your face aglow from the screen as Seifer fucking killsteals that robut right in front of everybody or Bartz and Galuf face unsettling questions about their masculinity aboard an abandoned pirate ship. I was an only child, and playing video games with others was a contradiction in terms. Furthermore, the idea of a game without an end-state or completable story, let alone for which one would need to pay continuously, seemed pretty bonkers to me. Also, as a grown-ass man with a wife and job and vague yet looming debt to at least two djinn, I detested the idea that my ability to play would be bound to other people, or that theirs would be bound to me.

    Imagine my pleasant surprise when, listening to an episode of The Besties video-gaming podcast, I was informed via Babiest McElboy that FFXIV:
    1. Has, in addition to its perpetual social, crafting, fashion and financial ecosphere, a coherent, finite storyline on par with or surpassing in quality any of the main-series games, and in fact four full-length campaigns at this point with the available expansions.
    2. It is perfectly possible to play the entirety of all four campaigns solo with a few specific exceptions, for which occasions the game will happily toss you in with a grip of like-leveled anonymous adventure-compadres with whom you can claim the day.
    3. Perhaps most winningly, the game's first two campaigns, A Realm Reborn and Heavensward are available to play for free, in which trial you can level your character up to 60, which is uh, pretty wild? It seems fairly wild to me you guys.

    Unable to withstand the sheer logic bearing down on me, I put that shit in my PSN cart and I was off to the races to play my first online game, my first MMO, and a hidden chapter of a thing I love with all my heart.

    These are my stories.

I remember piano lessons, the hours in freezing rooms

August 2020 Books Read Standouts: Tortilla Flat/The Sandman, Vol. 1

Tortilla Flat - John Steinbeck

    I have only ever been the biggest Steinbeck nerd and fanboy; Travels With Charley is still my favorite nonfiction work and Cannery Row was the first time I realized I could enjoy a novel that didn't have wizards, journeys to the center of the earth, or medieval anthropomorphic animals who enjoyed borderline pornographically-described feasts at least twice per book. That said, Tortilla Flat took me until my early 20's to appreciate, but I am a firm believer that we find the book when we are ready for the book; this I learned from the Cool Aunt who gave me a selection of Steinbeck's work, a gorgeous copy of Animal Farm fully illustrated by Ralph Steadman and the Grossology CD-ROM for Christmas when I was like eight. I think we can agree: a Diverse and Comprehensive Curriculum for the Studious Young Man.
    Tortilla Flat isn't like other Steinbecks in a lot of ways (and is very like them in others), but the primary distinctions are that it's 1). A then-modern retelling of Arthurian myth, which the descriptive language and dialogue reflect with thees and thous aplenty, and 2.) It is fucking hilarious.
    It's not a complicated story: Danny, our Arthur, returns home to Tortilla Flat, California from The War (don't worry about which one; war never changes) to find that he has inherited two shoebox houses from the Viejo, and gradually recruits his delinquent pals and also a pirate to be his renters. SHENANIGANS ENSUE, with a side order of MONKEYSHINES and, in direct defiance of presidential decree, a soupçon of MALARKY, all of which is treated with the most deadly seriousness that is apparently my kryptonite. Look I could go into particulars--"How is Danny supposed to cope with the crushing social pressure of his sudden elevation to the status of a man with two whole shitty, ramshackle houses?"--but there's really no way to relay just quite how and why this tragedy wrapped in a comedy garnished with several holy mysteries and crimes and also a miracle of beans is one of the funniest things I've ever read. It's like 150 pages and they fly, you can read it in a stretchy afternoon and I guarantee it'll be worth it.
    And now, the bad news. Steinbeck was a socialist and flamingly liberal by the standards of his day, like "J. Edgar Hoover ordered the IRS to audit him every year for the rest of his life out of spite" liberal, and was generally and correctly lauded for his compassion for and championing of the poor and the politically oppressed and sticking it to The Man, specifically banks, big business and exploitative employers. Unfortunately not all of his views have aged super well and Tortilla Flat is arguably the prime example, because 80% of the characterization relies on "LOL Mexicans are lazy and/or criminals!", and in the Year of Some of Our Lord 2021 it is extremely difficult to tell whether that's a sincere embracing of those tropes or a brilliant subversion of them; I'm personally inclined to believe the latter but then I'm not square in the crosshairs of the weapon that shoots those jokes, so it's not mine to say. The reader is encouraged to decide for themselves, he said, deftly dodging responsibility yet again. You'll never take me alive, coppers.

Score: 9/10 Pairs of Pants Bartered So Frequently They Form Their Own Economy

The Sandman, Vol. 1: Preludes & Nocturnes

    Oh look! It's something I manage to be a bigger nerd about than Steinbeck! And they said it couldn't be done.
    The Sandman, alongside Watchmen, is what proved to the world that comics could be legitimate art and legitimate literature, capable of and deserving to stand alongside any novel, painting, film or like, super-handsome sandwich. Neil Gaiman's writing career began as all the greats do: a pseudonymous biography of Duran Duran, and his comics career had a similarly traditional, classical start: finding an issue of Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing on a chair in a subway station, loving it, becoming friends with Alan Moore and taking over Miracleman for him when Moore's run on the title ended. Basic stuff! We've all been there! We all know this classic way. And after a successful run on that and a few other, smaller titles, DC told him he could have his own ongoing series under their Vertigo imprint, and he decided he wanted to revive a classic-but-defunct crime title, Sandman Mystery Theatre, except not have it involve any of the characters, plots or themes, and instead of a vigilante who used a sleep-powder gun to conk criminals out, it would be about the King of Dreams and his siblings, who are not gods, and how his death came to him. Say one thing for Neil Gaiman: say he starts as he means to go on, and one of the reasons for the series' enduring success is that he was able to go on as he started because he somehow got DC to agree to a contract stipulating that the series could only continue with him at the helm as writer and that he could leave at any time, for any reason. So he was able to tell the story he wanted, in the way he wanted, and I will always be grateful.
    One day, a rich man realized that his wealth brought him no happiness and, like all lunatics with more money than sense or humanity, decided that what he needed to be his best self was to defy Death and achieve immortality and so, because the kinds of men who earn Croesian wealth aren't great with metaphors, he founds an esoteric society, builds a magic circle and a prison of glass in his basement to literally capture and bind Death itself. But what he gets is Death's little brother: Dream, Morpheus, Oneiros, Kai'ckul, the King of Dreams himself. As a result, everything and everyone are royally goozled. People who are asleep when Dream is captured stay asleep. For seventy years. And people who are awake can't have real dreams, can't rest properly, because they've lost the ability to enter the Dreaming, which is Morpheus' kingdom and also kind of an extension of him and also he's kind of an expression of it? He brings us the dreams that come from the Dreaming and we use those to create the Dreaming, that he's a manifestation of? It's that kinda book. Once free, Dream sets about restoring his kingdom, which has fallen into ruin in his absence, and his servants, who have been negligent in their duties to the Dreaming and to the dreamers, and thereby hangs a tale.
    The Sandman is my favorite comic, but this first volume actually isn't a super-representative example of it, it's much more emphatically a horror story, because of what happens to Dream, what happens to all of the sleepers that he's prevented from shepherding to his kingdom, and most of all because of what he does to the rich old magician when he's finally freed. Subsequent volumes are much more fantastic, thoughtful, poetic and frequently sad: Dream helps John Constantine rescue a woman who has found her own way to dream and helps the Swamp Thing find the man who killed his father; he strikes a deal with William Shakespeare to help bring the Great Stories into a new age; he meets a friend on the same day in the same pub every century for a millennium; and he inherits the keys to an empty Hell when Lucifer declares it closed for business. It's all the mythopunk goodness that Gaiman would focus and strip down for American Gods but with time, time to worldbuild, time to develop characters, time for the reader to realize that all of its stories are leading to one conclusion, as all of ours do.
    I can't promise it'll mean as much to you as it means to me, but I guarantee The Sandman is unlike anything you've ever read, though somehow it'll feel like seeing an old friend again, one you last saw with sleeping eyes.

Score: 10/10 Chats With Death, Sitting On A Park Bench, Feeding The Birds

I've been living next to you my friend, but what kind of friend are you