Essays and posts page x3

      I wrote this mentally earlier in the day (it's been close to a month now), but in the interim, my body and mind have been all over the place, so we'll see how things actually end up turning out.

      I want to talk about analog horror and the body of the camera. Motivating this is that I started watching Dawko's reaction of some whatever the latest FNAF analog horror VHS series is -- Return to Freddy's? I think is what this one is called? Other motivating portions include that I recently finally got around to watching the beginning of the Walton Files -- though I am not caught up and in that vein only have a vague sense of what the style and content are about. And then finally, at some point within the last month, I've watched videos (one each) on FNAF/VHS and trends within the genre of analog horror in general.

      I don't have a super clear sense of what analog horror is. As I mentioned, I watched a video that spoke to something of the genealogy, but outside of / before that, I don't have a solid image. My sense is that it would arc back to connect with the found footage or shaky cam genre of horror films from the likes of The Blair Witch Project, Rec, or whatever that movie I saw about finding the jersey devil was called. Only focusing on the videos posted most recently to YouTube within this genre, it's easy to say that "Analog Horror" is somehow a misnomer -- these videos point back to VHS and radio wave signal technology and yet they are assembled in Blendr and the Adobe Premiere effects tab. Maybe this is true, but my larger sense is that it's not that helpful to take up this line of argumentation. Gatekeeping what "analog" means doesn't seem like that productive of a gesture to me. Additionally, I don't think I should be the person to do so as I don't have a robust understanding of analog versus digital technologies (my loose sense is that media studies people might be using the term analog in a different sense than gen z folx posting to youtube).

      Nevertheless, I think there can be things gained in picking apart the strange inconsistencies or quirks of the analog horror genre as it's developed online over the past 10 or 15 years. I can't speak to the global-ness of how the genre has developed, as my main images come from an America-centric webspace. My sense, though, is that the genealogy for the genre might not be the same everywhere in the world all the same. Naively, I would point to a film like Kurosawa Kiyoshi's Pulse / Kairo from 2001 for a case where a non-American film depicts a different kind of internet x horror ecology than from what I'm familiar being imaged in the US from the same period of time. However, since I don't have the luxary to research these different genealogies, I will write here to the effect of what I'm familiar with.

[^^ drawing of person holding a camera ^^]

      As I mentioned earlier, what I'm most interested in with regard to recent analog horror works is the camera. This interest comes from various places. In general (i.e., for when considering audio visual media), I'm interested in the camera; however, my sense is that the apparatus of analog horror has a different relation to the camera than, say, the apparatus of the Universal monster movie from the 1910s-1950s. From the analog horror videos I've seen, there seems to be almost always an effort to insist that the camera IS the eye. This is contrasted with a more Classical Hollywood understanding (to work off of David Bordwell and others' -- such as Laura Mulvey -- .... of the apparatus) of the camera and its gaze where the camera may incentivize identification, such as by being placed behind the shoulder of figure A, facing toward figure B (thus creating identification with figure A) but less often seeks to emulate the experience of vision itself (point of view shots / eyeline matches exist but their semantic contents differ from the camera of analog horror). I mention Laura Mulvey in my parenthetical accompanying "Classical Hollywood understanding," as she was often linked in my education with her thinking and writing on the Male Gaze -- a concept for to explain power relations of the camera's looking (one which objectified women and placed men as empty inheritors of audience spectatorial position). There's more than likely merit to consider gendered dynamics of the gaze of the cameras in analog horror, but they seem to sell themselves -- at least to my perception -- as more cranially enshrined and indebted vehicles. (One result of this is that direct head-proxy cameras are not as much be able to step outside of a person and act out power structures, as they are thus contingent to persons in different ways and forms).

      The camera has a body. The camera is a thing. It takes up space. It is made of metal and it exhibits an electronic impulse. The camera is held, the camera is on a stand, the camera is attach via gopro, the camera is an entity and that entity is not a human head. But in analog horror, the camera is often presented as if it were the human head -- as if it's oculus were the same as the human eyes, as if it sees the same thing that the person carrying it does. This is not always true and I am probably being reductive as I am not doing close analysis and instead speaking in abstract of how I feel these things have tended to be from a passing observation. At the same time. How could it be anything else? The camera offers a view onto the world. There isn't a way right now to rip out your eye sockets and show someone else exactly what it is you see, and so we use these technological intermediaries. In a crude and horrific sense, we decapitate ourselves for legibility. But I think that this is overly morose, or, rather, I think that human head decapitation is not necessarily a bad thing. The mistaking the camera for flesh is not necesarilly a dangerous mistake to make. While, yes, the camera doesn't often blink and the camera doesn't have a mouth or need to eat and the camera has different faculties governing it's ocular facsimile -- such as how it is or is not stabilized or focus on certain images etc. (The human head has eyes, but it is also the skull and many other organs and systems which play into each other and create a system of mutuality that generally works toward stability or making up for lack in other departments).

[^^ drawing of figures with video cameras ^^]

      One way in which the horror of having your head transplanted into the machine is that this gesture, as it shows up in analog horror, indicates how filming is never innocent. Because the camera is inseparable from a person who is there perceiving what it perceives, the act of filming (and our act of spectating) means that something is there, happening. (I messed up saying that a little bit I think, but I hope that it is still legible). To come at this from another direction, I'll put it this way: you can't have filming that is preeminent is analog horror -- annihilated is the illusion or imagined possibility of a tabula rassa -- a clean slate. There is a person who turns on the camera at some point. Disembodied filming can intrude into nature as if some objective observer (this is the tactic of documentary filmmaking, for example), but embodied filming is eternally linked to the reminder that there is a human there who is the cause of this all. You (video) must always have a reason for being.
*(Written in my notes for the above paragraph is "what does that say for people? Can video speak to people? Questions of "illegal" immigrants, for example-- what is a person without paperwork? ;; I no longer remember what I meant to write for this, but I trust myself that I meant something by it;; in the hopes that someone will be able to make sense of it in the future, I leave it here)

      Another potential positive reading of the decapitating camera could be to view it that the camera has become a part of the body. Rather than that the body has lost something in speaking to the camera, perhaps we can imagine that the camera is a protuberance that has been mended onto the body. Even though the camera produces the same effect as the head and vision, it does not inherently siphon off the ability of the head to perceive onto the world -- rather, it opens up an avenue through which to perceive in a different, more outwardly legible way. Part of the horror of a film like Rec, for example, is that the camera is so thoroughly combined with the body. When the camera is threatened, the body is too and vice versa. The horror is transmitted corporeally and in a felt manner (in my opinion). Even if there is no body there, the camera's vision can translate as corporeally horrific. Perhaps, therefore, there is a sense in which the camera *is* the body. Perhaps the camera's clunkiness speaks to the clunkiness embedded always in being human and in being a human merging with a machine -- see Akira, see Videodrome (see techno/biological/body horror).

[^^ drawing cords and wires and videography ^^]

      To continue to corrupt McLuhan's oft cited "the medium is the message," I think it's easily arguable that for analog horror -- as the name suggests -- this is precisely the point. The medium (the camera-ness -- the analog-ness) *IS* the message (the horror ; the art and beauty and emotion being transcribed and rended by the text). For analog horror, the fact of analog which is inseparable from the content and narrative of the text [what is probably true for all texts, but I mention it here because it's imminently visible]) -- you have to say why you exist (give a message; message for why you are x medium).

      At the same time, to return to what I mentioned at the beginning, about the meaning of "analog" being potentially contestable, I would like to point to how many analog horror texts from the past decade are constructed for the most part digitally (that is, outside of the camera) -- such as with 3D software or just all in the editing software and via the use of overlaid analog-aesthetic effect interventions. I don't bring this up to dash the prospects or legitimacy of the medium, though. I think it's just an interesting circumstance. Now even the body has been substituted, and all that we have is the camera which claims that it once stood for a body and head which held vision onto the world. The Walton Files is so interesting in this regard, as the series frequently uses express 2D animation. The 2D characters are trapped in the medium of recorded technology -- of the camcorder etc. There is an important and powerful asynchroneity here -- the medium shears against itself and this is precisely the message, in my opinion.

[^^ drawing of the decapitated camera ^^]

      I'll close out on this. In the video I watched about tropes and shortcomings of analog horror, the youtuber talked about how some more recent analog horror texts are comparatively more constrived and/or ridiculous than earlier entries. I've noticed this in ways as well. Because analog horror is inherently clunky, in a certain way -- analog technology is antiquated-- because of this, in order for analog technology to be the medium of a text, there needs to be sufficient justification (seems to be the general logic to these texts). Usually this is some permutation of "my employer required that I film my journey." While this IS often ridiculous, it again returns to the ineffible non-innocence. There is a relation of power which has called for this to be. Even looking back at The Blair Witch Project, the text cannot exist by itself -- it must be justified as a student film or some such. Analog horror is text which exists within the diegesis as it exists on the screen. There is something so critical about this I cannot properly put it into words. Why are we making art? What is the meaning of life? Why even go on any more? It is an existential dread which pulses invisibly underneath. MY EYES ARE UP HERE. you cant even look at the world anymore thats how bad it is

[^^ bonus drawing of the decapitated camera via legos ^^]

--> motivating the think of the children is the khadidja mbowe video on new young conservatives ; i wonder if there's a difference between [] and [] for think of the children (i had it last night, but now i forgot)       I've been mulling over what might be a dilemma recently. Historically, conservative groups often use a "think of the children" rhetoric for scapegoating a given topic (e.g., DND, gay people). In reaction to this, I stand in alignment with arguments that say we should be skeptical and resistive to arguments which fearmonger about the state of "today's youth." These narratives of generational corruption are necessarily conservative as they are anti-progress as they seek to reentrench the way children were imagined to be in the past. Sometimes the scapegoated topic is an identity or marginalized group, such as recent narratives around drag story time and children's media which has a secret gay agenda. Other times, the topic is a different type of technology (since, of course, such things as identity and media ecology are technologies in their own right), such as television, video games, or TikTok where the argument emphasizes the technological as the corrupting factor -- [insert 'X' thing] will rot your mind. Observing this, I hold strong that "think of the children" narratives are conservative and thus antithetical considerations in the battle for social progress (in legislation and/or art). That said, it can seem difficult to maintain this viewpoint when faced with certain conjoined narratives of the degeneration of the youth (test scores are lower post-COVID, etc.). To evidence this, I point to the popularity of "brain rot" as a logically sound concept.

      There are differences in the way children engage with the world today from how children did so 50 years ago, undoubtedly. Similarly, it's impossible that the children of today are in every regard more "progressive" than their ancestors when they were children. I feel like it's all but certain, for example, that there could be some aspect of health which is worse off now than in the past. Evidencing this with retrospective examples, I think it's fair to say that children who grew up in houses with lead paint would have had some number of worse health conditions than those who, three or four generations prior, did not grow up in houses with lead paint. That said, I don't feel comfortable ascribing, in the moment, a given popular technology as this era's lead paint. I think it's important to be warry of the lead paints of the world -- the ways in which the infrustructure around us threatens to harm us -- but that there are or have been lead paints does not mean that any given technology IS a lead paint. In fact, arguments which speculate about the harmful health effects that some popular technology produces are probably more often than not just that, speculative. Hypothetically, anything *could* be or become an anathema-- but that we can theorize that television could iradiate the mind does evidence anything with regard to saying that it *does.*

[^^ drawing inspired by videodrome (originally drafted for another essay) ^^]

     Coming from this framework, though, I'm at some kind of crossroads as to how to respond to certain politcal shifts in the past decade -- that is the "rise" (more likely, resurgence) of the alt-right, epitomized most recently via the reelection of Donald Trump. Popular narratives of today place the blame of this election on the youth of today. These arguments claim that the white youth of America, the likes of which would be wont to watch Joe Rogan or Talk Tuah or some such-- that these white, or anyhow conservative youth-- that their numbers are growing or have grown, and that they are the new majority and the people who will lead the dominant/hegemonic culture for the next little while. This type of narrative seems scary and depressing and in observing it, my instict is to jump to a "think of the children!" line of argument: "we need to do something about all these tiktok teens who are growing up thinking andrew tate is an okay role model and who reenshrine white supremacy as the hegemonic norm." Anecdotally, I observe youth I grew up around who are part of this demographic and I observe the media ecologies I grew up around which inculcated conservativism and reactionary rhetoric-- anecdotally, I observe this and think, "the kids of today are worse off and trending in a dangerous direction" (or something along these lines). But then I pull myself back as I realize this is still a think of the children argument, even if it seems to be supportive of my personal ideologies.

      How do we navigate this? I'm not entirely sure, but I wonder if Videodrome holds any answers. I wonder if the issue is not the media or anything like that such as the children or the youth or the whatever else, but that the problem is the threat of a poisonous ideology in and of itself. But how do we combat ideology? In what arenas? (insert joke about videodrome -- i.e., the video arena). I'm not sure right now.

      At the end of the day, think of the children rhetoric (and conservative rhetoric in general) is a rhetoric which places the self as inherently correct -- where deviation is injury. And I want to believe that I won't always be correct, or that I won't always be the authoritative voice on an issue. That is, I want to believe that there are other ways of being in and of seeing the world (even ones which may seem evil or abhorrent). I want to think of children but I want the children to be allowed to think for themselves too. But I don't know exactly how we get there (or hold ourselves there). I believe there are harmful things in the world and I don't know how to square my image of pro-israel propaganda as harmful with the desire to not say that this type of propaganda appearing on tiktok is the root of the issue. Maybe that's part of the reframing -- that we ought to focus on roots and not symptoms. I'm not entirely sure

     One of the stories from the Zhuangzi (one of the two main Daoist texts) tells of Cook Ding, a butcher who's perfectly in tune with the Dao. He is able to perform his butchering actions as non-actions (not the best translation for this word but it's historically the most common one) and thus he can cut apart a cow without even damaging his knife almost at all. The comparison is that a cook who is not in tune with the Dao -- whose actions are strained -- exerts excessive force and thus quickly wears out their knife. Further, the straining cook requires a sharp knife to cut in the first place. (Here's a video I watched in an undergrad class I took on Daoism that essentially summarizes the story. When I was originally envisioning this essay, all I had was this: Minecraft Steve is not Cook Ding.

...

     I'm someone that, pretty much the only part of minecraft that motivates me to play is the food system. I don't know why exactly, but that's how it is. Every time I've started a world, it's for to make food (and then I'll eventually crash out and stop playing, but that's besides the point). ...

     In middle school, I dreamed of making a mod that would add all kinds of plants and trees from around the world into the game, where you could cook with roots and tree bark and and and... I remember thinking of all the different ways these plants could look in the mincraft art style and thinking of what the crafting recipes would be...

     When I first first started playing minecraft, I would always look up a seed that spawned near a mushroom island (a rare area with giant mushrooms and special mushroom cows), so I could get unlimited mushroom stew and hang out around the mooshrooms. When dark oak forests were added to the game, I remember getting so excited because now big mushrooms were that much more accessible (they appear naturally in these forests). There was one time on one of my friend's realms where all I did was make a bunch of holes in the ground to grow giant mushrooms. Every night I ran around killing skeletons so I could grow more mushrooms in the future (bones can be made into a kind of fertilizer).

     I remember taking home economics (home ec) classes in middle school. I loved them so much,, sewing and cooking. When I moved away from the town I grew up in, the only teacher I asked my parents to invite to our move out party (something we had) was my home ec teacher, Mrs. Ross. I took every home ec class I could, even signing up for after school classes with so I could eek out just a little bit more. Since moving, though, I haven't been able to pursue those interests. The new town my family moved to was conservative and home ec wasn't offered at my schools anymore. Since then, I've only fallen further and further away from pursuing home ec activities in my waking physical life. My skills in cooking and sewing have degraded to the point where I've developed an eating disorder related to an inability to make food for myself and I have meltdowns triggered by the nightmarish mess that is the sensory experience of wearing clothes (read: clothes not made to my needs). But I still enjoy food in minecraft. However, these days it's as an anachronism with my everyday life.

[^^ drawing of the new minecraft pig variants (and the old one) ^^]

     Last week, while I was vocal stimming on the couch in the same room as my mom, I repeated one of the only lines I know from Steven Universe, "if every pork chop were perfect, we wouldn't have hot dogs!". (While I haven't seen Steven universe, the line has nonetheless been ingrained into my head; first, because it was included in the ads that ran for the show when it was first airing on Cartoon Network [the only channel i watched steadily as a child]; and second, because I vaguely recall someone from the graduating high school class above me having the quote as their yearbook quote [while i don't know the person, I vaguely feel like they were someone one of my friends knew very well -- maybe from robotics?] -- this was marked as meaningful since this was the last year students were allowed to have yearbook quotes). I said the line for basically no reason (see: vocal stim) -- I think while scrolling on my phone at the time -- but when my mom heard it, she replied something like, 'that would be funny if that were true.'
Me: what do you mean?
Mom: what, so that's to say that porkchop is the only part of the pig that hot dogs are made from? (implication: they are not)


     Reflecting on my mom's comments in the proceeding days, my thoughts came to minecraft. As far as the game is concerned, YES!, porkchops are the only (meat) part of a pig (that matters). If hot dogs need to be made from discarded pig meet, then indeed there wouldn't be any hot dogs in mincraft because porkchop are all pigs have to offer (and every porkchop in the game is perfect, in effect; thus there would be no reason to slurry them into hot dogs -- in this hypothetical)

     If what my mom says is true (which I have no reason to believe otherwise, she grew up on a farm), then either the minecraft player character is wasteful, or minecraft pigs are genuinely built different and only consist of porkchop meat. I think this is interesting. While the conceits of fiction should be respected -- that minecraft is not the real world *despite what game theory videos may suppose (/joking)* and thus operates differently from the systems, physics, histories, and cultures of the world i live in. i think it's probably reductive to leave the conversation at that, though. While minecraft, as any fiction would be, is within its rights to imagine a fiction of pigs as only porkchops, readers of the text are equally within their rights to ask what that may mean or why that may be the case (in this case i am a reader of minecraft as a text).

text to break up the flow... maaybe come back in the future to find an image

     An increasingly common observation I see people make about Minecraft is that it's genealogy is colored by a historically and culturally informed context and imagination. (see this video about mob redigns ; see this video the enchanting table language ; see this video about the addition of leave particles). While minecraft post-the microsoft acquisition has branched out a number of different directions from how it initially initially looked like (see: piglins and the nether, mostly; and I guess whatever is up with villagers and pillagers -- basically, the ways minecraft has moved into having a distinct [read: non-tropey] lore)-- so while more recent updates to the game have added to and changed the systems first present during the alpha builds of the game, for example, there still remain many of the systems and images that were originally injected into the game. (E.g., the generic suite of hostile mobs). The upcoming minecraft drop is interesting to coincide with this, as one of the main features it's adding to the game is to shake up the aesthetics and spawning mechanics of the passive mobs that have for so long been default to the game (cows, pigs, chicken, sheep). While there may still be a Euclidean ideal for what a pig is in the minds of players used to the systems of the game, the internal systems (what the developers have written those to be) have shifted such to disrupt that.

      **To be specific for those who don't know, pigs used to be always the same pink pig no matter where they spawned, and they could spawn in lots of places; now there are three pig variants -- each with a different model [even classic pig is redesigned a bit] -- that vary depending on the temperature of the biome they spawn in (cold, hot, or other; where other is pink pig, and cold and hot are all new ones). Even though there are new aesthetics to the pig, the porkchops remain the same (i.e., are still dropped by all) and only meat the player gets when killing a pig.

     *side note: I think there's an argument to make that the game's segmented development history of repeated avoidance of adding consumable drops to animals added to the game reflects a kind of settler relation to meat/food which valorizes moral veganism / demonizes meat consumption*

     Essentially, I'm arguing that minecraft's implementation of passives mobs -- here, pigs -- is perhaps indicative of a political imagination (or something else) which imagines only certain, ubiquitous images for what food can be. That said, my thoughts beyond this are still loose. Regardless, I think there's a lot of room to run in considering the politics of minecraft's food systems. For example, while I'm not sure what golden carrots are, they're the objectively best food source in the game (and, they are most easily acquired via the dubiously conscripted labor of villagers ; i.e., them being the best encourages players to conscript village labor [is one reading of the text] ; see also, Folding Ideas' video on minecraft + colonialism). Or consider that while porkchops and steak are roughly equivalent in being alternative stand ins for the #bestfoodsourceingame (golden carrots), mutton is an remarkably worse food to eat than either of porkchops or stake, as such the game systems perhaps construct a hierarchy which imagines some cuisine better than others. (provisional side note/interjection to say I'm not that educated on the irl nutrition or whatever of these foods and I'm also not educated on butchery or animal biology). In having food be a necessary part of the game for that players need to invest in and find solutions for it (i.e., food is the most constant resource being requested from players by the game), I feel there's merit to saying that the game's systems place a hierarchical weight on the cost of comming to eat a given type of food (i.e., not all food is equal). The games systems say, in effect, that people who eat pork are better (at what?) than those who eat lamb.

[^^ drawing of the ingredients for to make beetroot stew ^^]

     I'll end with this. Outside of sweetberries, I like most all of the food sources in the game (even tropical fish, even suffering, even kelp; each of which I've had as my primary food source at various points in time). And so, more than anything else, I just wish there were more. While people may rag on beetroot soup for being arcane and pointless (e.g., this video) or complain that rabbit stew is impossible to make or that it wastes time and gives less food than the base things started with, I'm mostly fine with these things -- in fact, i wish there were more. Let me make lamb stew. Let me make fox jerky. Let me eat fucked up shit or let me be healthy. I really like it and i would like it there were more opportunities to do more. (Though I suppose there's a point where it becomes overwhelming and a barrier to entry... a matter for another day). My happiest memory playing modded minecraft (which I'll write an essay on anorher day) was playing on a server with friends and having my base be a bunch of different farms and food sources. I forget what the name of the mod is (I looked it up! it's called "Pam's Harvestcraft" ! -- only supports up to version 1.12), but adds a bunch a bunch of food to the game and a bunch of cooking and food prep mechanics. My end goal in the server was to build suitable infrustracture for producing the ingredients necessary to make the best food source in the game (i had to look this up too, the food is called "Thankful Dinner" -- i'd link the wiki, but there's only the Fandom page, so). Each time I got on the server I would make a little bit more progress toward my goal, little by little unlocking the ability to make more and more food items. I think I end up quitting shortly after achieving my goal, but the journey itself still comes with smiling memories in my head :D

     As for the future, I want to try out caves of qud at some point. I watched a video recently showing off a datapack the youtuber made which revamped minecraft's food system to implement the one from caves of qud. I didn't know about this game before, but it sounds like basically it's a procedurally generated recipe system where there's a ton of different ingredients (the video had around 50 in the data pack iirc) that you can combine to give your dish different effects depending on how you combine them. And then for the recipes, you can try to experiment and make dishes, or you can find the procedurally generated recipes in the loot chests from villages and other structures. I'm interested in how the gameplay experience feels with either of these -- I think I want to try it out to see how it goes;
Anyways, that's some food for thought-- Something to chew on. Okee bye ヾ(＾ ∇ ＾).

     **the "realism" in the title is that the food is not realistic bc there should probably be more meats coming from these animals; u telling me the white poof just disintegrates all the ribs and face meat, for example?**

**saying that minecraft doesnt do realism is not meant to say that the game is bad ; although it is a qualitative observation, the intent is not to qualify it in the good/bad kind of way**

      I feel almost certain that i started writing a review for this game a couple of weeks ago, but now I'm not sure where I've placed it. In the mean time, I'll write from what i can. (It's been a week and some change since I was all in on Dungeons, so some things may have shifted off into miasma -- as such, the review will be fragmentary)

[^^ drawing of the arch illager -- the 'final boss' of Minecraft: Dungeons ^^]

      ... in theory, my sense is that it would be generally fine for a game to have a definitive best set of equipment. the issue that causes with Dungeons, though is not that there *is* a objective best (there is, it's the verdent cloak), but that the game falls off into being almost genuinely unplayable the second you so much as stray away from the image of perfection. i'll touch on this later, but the game's systems vastly incentivize speed to the expense of that the default game experience is sluggishly slow. i don't know what the best fix would be, but i imagine it would have to do with tweaking the numbers, where the best can still be the best and remain where it is, but the default needs to be raised in some kind of way. otherwise it's just a 20$ farming-for-verdent-cloak-with-good-enchantments simulator

      ... The Tower is fine but is unfortunately not that replayable. For those who don't know, the tower is a procedurally generated dungeon/boss rush challenge, where you clear floors of enemies / bosses, and each time you ascend, you can switch out your current gear for gradually scaling procedurally generated gear (or opt instead to receive points to power up your gear in the future). the procedural generation, from what i understand, resets every week, but throughout the week will remain the same. In this way, it's perhaps more interesting than most rogue-lites as the replayability changes some of the ways you can interact with the game. For example, the static nature of the enemies and loot means that you can iteratively learn what items you'll be offered when and what you'll have to fight with them. That is to say, the gameplay loop incentivizes approaching it as if it were a puzzle. (However, like solitaire, some weeks are easier to solve than others -- and sometimes it feels like it's not possible to get anywhere at all; it's frutrating in these cases that you would have to wait another week before you're able to try again).

      I maybe intoned it earlier, but to clarify, the static nature of the challenge means that you're less easily able to brute force it via rerolling until you get a good start (in Balatro terms, that might be hard sending it each run until you get good early jokers or blind skip rewards). Basically, the tower is mandatory Balatro set seed runs. (If you manipulate your save file or download one from another person, you're technically able to share your seed -- again, the Balatro equivalent would be the way you can share your run's seed once your run is over [and anyone else who uses your seed would effectively get the same run], but that in Dungeons it is not natively built into the game systems and requires a little bit more jerry-rigging to figure out).

      ... In general, the scaling in the game is +_+ ,,, this is especially visible when you start ascending into the upper diffculty Apocalypse plus levels (what is, like, NG++ bonus difficulty mode). Constantly having to trudge uphill is unfun, but then the second you try to do a mission at even the slightest bit below your level, it's lick rock lee without his weights but in an unfun way where it's so much not a challenge that it's not even worth it [plus you can only progress your equipment's power level by playing at the highest difficulty available]. Bogglingly hard or trivially easy. Biting my tongue to get through it or imagining stakes into the telletubbies.

**At the same time, I think there's clearly some kind of appeal to the ridiculous difficulty and inchingly slow progression as I played the game for like 40+ hours and it never really changed (I mean people play league of legends too, so). Life is easier to get through if my biggest op is the shitty progression of Minecraft: Dungeons.

text now.. meybe image later

      ... Enchanted mobs are a neat idea in theory -- like, woah! that's a pretty cool and logical escalation of the inherited game systems of minecraft that open up new planes of interaction and imagination. In practice, though, they make the game into a rage game. (I wanted to play an RPG/rogue-lite; I'm all for games that play with genre, but for brain-turn-off games like this, I think my volition mattered -- or I would like if it did). The biggest culprits (and it's not even a competition), are the enchantments, Chilling and Deflect. Since I haven't said yet, enchanted mobs are mobs that have bonus effects applied to them (these are randomly selected or not when the group of mobs is spawned in -- they can stack [up to how many, i don't know]). The bonus effects are generally variants of the equipment enchantments available to the player. Examples of enchantments available to players and enemies include Rush (where the character's speed increases by a percent [maxing out at 90%] for a short time whenever they take damage), Burning (where the character has a small aura around them that applies a constant DOT burn damage), Gravity Pulse (where every 3 seconds the character magnetizes all nearby enemies to them), etc.

      Chilling and Deflect are the most annoying because, more than any others, they prevent you from playing the game (the third worst is probably gravity pulse, but the range is still thankfully at least somewhat small). Chilling slows down enemies' attack AND movement speed by I think something like 20 or 30% in a HUGE radius -- like, I'm pretty sure they don't even have to be on the screen and can still slow you down (annoying because then that means you don't know where they are slowing you down and thus you can't even kill them to stop the effect). Deflect is fairly self-explanatory, reflecting all enemy projectiles back at them (what's annoying is that the max PROC for the player is 40%, but monsters have a default of 100% effective deflect). This is relavent because ranged combat is the only genuinely feasible way to clear levels that are of a higher power level than that of your gear; so if enough deflect mobs spawn, you just have to reset. Additionally, since the damage/health ratio for the player is wonky in comparison to for monsters, it's VERY frequent that you will shoot an enemy that just spawned, it be revealed that it has deflect, and the projectile instantly bounces back to you and one shots you (using up one of your lives for what's realistically a bs reason).

      I don't think I can adequately explain how fucking angry these enchantments make me. Like I want to scream at a wall. LET ME SPEAK YOU FUCKERS! STOP GETTING IN THE WAY OF MY ABILITY TO PRETEND AT HAVING AUTONOMY VIA ENGAGING WITH FANTASY AND FICTION!!!!

      ... On much of a similar note, spiders equally make me want to rip my face off. As with Chilling and Deflect, they remove your autonomy. Realistically, they're only a reliable annoyance for the first 10, maybe 15 hours -- i.e., before enchanted mobs become common place. By the time you get to Apocalypse or Apocalypse+ difficulty, they're trivially nothing. Except, that is, if you so much as ignore them for even a second, in which case it's crash out all over again. Even though they're super squishy by that point, their ability to stop you from playing the game remains the same. To clarify, by stop you from playing the game, I mean that they shoot a web projectile at the player, which, if they hit you, freezes the player in place for several seconds, where you're only able to spin violently in circles and ~maybe~ attack guys that run into you, if any get close enough. (It's frequent, however, that when you get frozen you'll then end up dying anyways since you're no longer able to run up and kill the ranged enemies who now can freely pick you off). Like I actually hate the spiders and think they should not be in the game the way they are. I have done physical bodily harm to myself as a result of the mechanics they throw onto the player (which, to be clear, is my fault -- need to find better outlets to stim which are less self-harm-oriented).

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      ... I'm not sure why I came back to it time after time. To put it frankly, it's a veritable skeleton of a game. Yet. It's also fun in its own way. Playing (raging at) Minecraft: Dungeons was something for me to do while wilting in the dusty breeze of delirium I've been collapse in since the start of the year. The autonomy the game provided me was I think one of the biggest parts to it. I'm in grad school right now, and this most recent semester has been the most painful one yet. Week after week, the matrices of institutional power choked me out and told me I was disallowed from living, from having a voice -- jointly, my personal anxieties had ratcheted up to where I was losing the ability to eat or even leave my room. I felt angry at being derided and helpless and sad and alone at how little my anger and mere being matter to the system I was pincered within. But Dungeons let me experience a fiction of simulated freedom. Dungeons was a space where I could play at having control and could pretend that my actions could be heard by others and, even further, effect change in the organization of the world. This is why any threats to my autonomy that erupt within the game get read as so traumatic. However, they also let me imagine a fantasy where they didn't exist, and pretend that if only this fantasy were so, then all my problems would melt away (the fantasy of a controlled and fictional scapegoat -- what if scapegoats really were the problem, then I wouldn't have to face the sloshing rot I've got eating at my veins). Realistically, even if spiders and annoying monster enchantments weren't part of the game, there would likely be other things that got in the way of my having a totally free reign of control and autonomy. In fact, I know they wouldn't be, as the current build of the game has many other anti-autonomous infelicities.

      I will now briefly run through some of the other elements that have intervened in my autonomy:
   >>>  The general jankiness of the moving is annoying. Since I've only recently started playing the game, I'm not that read up on the development history of the game. My understanding, though, is that the updates have mainly focused on mending speedrun skips and ways in which players are able to flex their autonomy to supercede even the inent of the game's internal systems. It's fine to patch out speedrun skips -- albeit a bit annoying -- but what's irksome is that the current version of the game still features a significant number of basic movement bugs that get in the way of playing. These include the player occassionally freezing in place when walking up stairs (this applies to both stair block and slopes of full blocks, each of which the player is supposed to ascend automatically) *crash out* and the player sometimes clipping through the ground while traversing non-horizontal terrain (which sometimes fixes itself but sometimes ends up being a softlock).
   >>>  While I haven't palyed all of the DLC, I purchased and started playing the underwater one (idk the name off-hand). As will likely not be a shock, the underwater movement is a slog to play through as you move slower and, even further, your normal movement options (such as the roll) are essentially disabled due to you having to permanently swim and the altered movement system that comes with that. It feels more like a gimmick than anything. I can't imagine an entire game being designed with this movement system. (I'm trying to be agentive, thank you very much).
   >>>  In addition to the one DLC I purchased, there's two DLC levels that you can try for free. Furthermore, all the DLC enemies are possible spawns for the Tower, regardless of what DLC you own. For what reason, I don't know, but several of these DLC-unique enemies are essentially spider reskins -- i.e., guys that remove your autonomy in different ways. Not sure why we're trying to innovate on ways to stop the player from playing the game. Examples include the iceologer (the mob famously not added to minecraft due to the ever controversial mob vote) which can freeze the player in an ice block, where you have to spam click your character model to become able to do things again, and some wind guy that I don't know the name of which constantly casts a spell that knocks you up airborn if you are in range of it. Very frustrating.
   >>>  In general, many cheap kills that maje me rage. The whole interaction with the locket that makes mobs join your side and using it on a creeper (it's ai breaks and it giga sprints over and one shots you, even when it's literally allied with you) sends me into a screaming tantrum everytime it happens. (Gen).


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      ... One I guess positive affect of the game being so infuriating to play is that therefore encourages you to speedrun it. (Now, we can have a conversation for if a game is good because it incentivizes you to play it less, but that's besides the point for right now) With that, I would say there's likely a difference between a rogue-lite like Isaac which incentivizes you to play it less (in the sense of your run being shorter) and Dungeons which incentivizes you to finish individual, more or less already existing levels quicker ;; this conversation would also be right to consider the reward of developing mastery over a game's systems -- that this perhaps can be the appeal of a game in and of itself... but that's besides the point. Being able to zoom, zoom, zoom around and through all the enemies in the levels you've learned the spawning patterns of-- the thrill of being able to do this once you're maxed out, spamming your artifacts off cool down and such-- it is quite fun and make me produce much dopamine. *Here's a video showing the high end of what speedrunning type stuff can look like in Dungeons; not quite subway surfers, but i think it's close enough to deserve a shout*

      ... Based on my play experience and where I was in my relative life while playing it, I think Dungeons is a pretty snug fit for a game to play while listening to what I've been calling "crushing" music. I don't know how to describe crushing music, but it's basically harsh-er drone and gabber-esque stuff. The brain-crushing end of stimmy music. (I would link my playlist to show what I'm talking about, but as it's through YT music and most of the songs are ones that I've uploaded to my library, the majority of it won't show up). Rage rage rage. And small steps forward that can't be overturned.

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      ... The dlc unique weapons and trinkets are neat, in theory, but, again, don't matter at the end of the day bc the best gear is just that much better. That said, I found some of the trinkets fairly fun to use when playing through the Tower. It seems like there's potential for some neat builds with some of them (however they are kneecapped from being able to realize any of that -- even in the hermaneutic environment that is the Tower -- bc you need to get giga lucky for to get the required rolls to do anything with them synergy wise). Speaking of, the system for enchanting equipment is in general too volatile for my liking. You have no way to express control over what enchants you get, only being able to reroll individual bad enchantments one at a time and hope you get lucky (at a high and increasing price; not even able to rerolled the whole slot [of 1-3 possible enchants] and thus providing extremely diminishing returns. Further, there is such a big difference between the enchants, where some are unusable and some are essentially necessary (I'm looking at you Bow Bursting and Tempo Theft for ranged weapons ,, or alternatively Accelerate for also ranged weapons). The highs are pretty high, but the lows are most of what there is. It's also got that skinner box-type flow where you're incentivized to keep checking the enchants of every piece of gear you get, even though the vast vast majority of them will be unusable. Also annoying that the unerring power scaling means that once you inevitably do get equipment with good enchants, you'll have to pay a maintenance fee and do occassional chores in order to be allowed to use them (or you could try and get two sets of equipment you alternate between while the other is at the dry cleaners [i.e., blacksmith], but i never did that, so idk).

      ... I haven't played much of the ancient hunt gamemode. It seems neat enough. I like the idea of the rune sacrifice system, but it's a little bit too unintuitive for my liking (I'd rather not have to tab back and forth between the game and the wiki; with this, i have to). Also, I think it (or something. but I'm scapegoating the ancient hunt gamemode bc I refuse to accept my ineptitude) for some reason glitched my game so as to break one of the beginner achievements so that it's now not showing up as even being obtainable, which is annoying. (Now everyone thinks I don't know how to finish the tutorial 😥, says my negative self talk).

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      ... Some of the environments are more fleshed out than others. In general, I think I like how the game adapts Minecraft's world generation systems and general aesthetic -- it both holds true to its predecessor and innovates in generally cool ways. The mechanic of hidden chests, though, i don't understand at all. How it works (I have NO idea how) isn't well communicated imo. The effect of this obscurity is that I end up running around the entire map, checking literally every corner of the map -- even trying to walk into walls and such -- and then usually finding a whole lot of nothing. I get spurred on by the idea that there could be hidden chests such that I waste time looking in places where I guess they can't spawn and have never spawned anything at all. The alternative to this is that I give up on the mechanic entirely and just skip to the end of the level -- in which case, like what's the point of having a mechanic if it's so hard to figure out that people try to avoid ever dealing with it [and the it is literally something that's supposed to be a reward for the player]).

      To be charitable, though, I realized in the last stint of my playing that if you look at the map (not the mini-map or whatever that you see overlaid on the screen when pressing 'tab,' but the map you get when pressing 'm'), it looks like there's an indicator for if there are secret chests on the map and how many of them you've uncovered out of how many there are in total. Also, for the two or three days during when I got my algorithm to recommend me Dungeons-related content (an incredibly micro-niche of videos that both have low view counts and which are largely from several years ago), I found a video that showed a reliable hidden chest spot on the Desert temple map, where you roll kind of out of bounds and can then also find a bonus hidden room with a diamond-tier chest depending on which variant of the map tile you get.

In general, though, I stand in alliance with the YouTuber Fir's critiques of games employing intermittent reward systems (i.e., hiding rewards inside of stuff; Fir centers his critique on the rock break moons from Mario Odyssey) -- it's not the type of game design I enjoy dealing with.

      Since starting grad school, I've been thinking about narrative more (volitionally and not). In the past, I've spoken out (not widely) against narrative. To narrativize and summarize: the vicissitudes of my experiences in undergrad tore through me often as shrapnel. At that time, for the purposes of survival, it was expedient for me to read into the violences necessarily compresent with narrative (as violent -- i.e., to read narrative as necessarily violent). I was especially critical of historiography -- a brand of narrative with a human cost (theoretically, potentially) implicated within it. If there were a way to compare the perspectives on narrative i hold now to those from then, I'm sure there would be differences. I'm sure there would also be similarities.

      In the most simple (read: reductive) sense, narrative is order. Narrative is the flow of time and the march of progress. Narrative is a means for people to create meaning from among the hostile static of their waking and dreaming worlds. Sometimes it can be healing. Sometimes it can choke your limbs off. Moral or not, however, narrative (or whatever it may be called) seems to be almost primordial for to how it's integral to facilitating how communication works in 2025. Narrative makes a break-up into a hit song. Narrative makes childhood trauma into a bestselling memoir. Narrative makes an arithmatic error into grounds for a conspiracy. Narrative seems almost indispensible for explaining the world right now. And so, I'll put a pause on my narrative skepticism for the time being. It has hurt me, indelibly (but not uniquely), and it rips poison through my tongue each and every day, however, I'm just me and it's here to stay.

[^^ drawing of the cover for Colleen Hoover's book, 'it ends with us' ^^]

      In my senior year of undergrad, the English department started doing "salons" -- what were events for students and teachers to get together at night to discuss a given topic. I went to two of these, one on adaptations and one on booktok. One of the comments a classmate made during the booktok salon stuck with me more than the others. Some context for the comment and my clinging to it is that by this point in the night, the discussion had defaulted to a short circuit of ouroboric (and conservative) observations about 2024 readership habits and inclinations. Basically, the same garden variety of romance book fearmongering and whatever passes as a liberal-veiled think of the children in the given year -- Colleen hoover bad, etc. etc. Adding to the milieu, one of my classmates said, for why they degeneration of reading novels is something to raise the alarms (this is the comment that's stuck with me), that 「reading novels and studying English is necessary because it let's you become practiced in the field of narrative, something strictly vital to have a grip on in order to navigate life in the present day」. At the time, I was like, 「what r u saying gurl??? Don't you know that narrative is tbh very problematic? Are you for real actually defending narrative right now? Honestly. dni ✋️.」 (This is dramatization of what my internal thoughts were basically -- phrased intentionally hyperbolically as i felt that would be funny).

      In the interim, I've thought about other ways of approaching my classmates comment. While i would retain the narrative that these comments are for to legitimate the enterprise of the humanities and more specifically, the English dept, I think that the utility of narrative proficiency extends to other fields and parts of life as well. (To be clear, that i say the comment is self interested is not to say it's invalid for that merit; it totally makes sense to be defensive in the face of attacks at your right to exist; it also makes sense to say that whatever thing you've got going on is unique and thus valuable -- even though i might not agree 100% with a self-interested comment made by another person, i respect their right to make it and the real suite of things they address in making it; im self-interested from time to time too).

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      One of the things that has had me thinking about the utility of narrative was a recent non sequitor video from patricia taxxon's second channel (puppyhelic triangle) that offers critiques to a random furry animated short it came across. Taxxon notes that it seems like the creator has growing pains now that [theyre] working with a time based medium (animation). Citing the fact that the creator first got their start in comic artistry, taxxon notes a pattern of shots lasting for a few seconds too long, giving the animation the feeling like characters are waiting for things to happen. Taxxon also notes that the resolution achieved at the end doesnt track with the events of the story -- the snake bf accepts his [animal] bf despite his clumsiness, yet all the catastrophe that happened was circumstantial and unrelated to [animal] bf's presence in the text. In the same vein, shortly before deciding to write this, I saw a review for an animated movie i haven't seen on letterboxd which cited the flawed story as the films main deficit -- bringing it down, despite the inventive animation etc. etc.

      I'm not caring for to litigate these examples. As taxxon says at the end of her video, it's not as helpful getting bogged down in doctoring the present as it is to keep working on new projects into the future. Rather, I bring these examples up to indicate that narrative is, at least to some spectators, seen as a crucial element of a text.

      It's interesting to compare these examples, in the broad strokes, to the comments my classmate made during the salon. Interesting, that is, because it vividly demonstrates the way narrative can be found in many media. My argument, then, is that because narrative is so prevalent and so unavoidable (infiltrating every field), the ability to deal with narrative (most relavenlty, the ability to generate cohesive/complex narratives) is a marketable quality. *now, to be fair, even though this is what i believe and am arguing, none of my examples speak to this effect exactly; my examples are on the individual scale and represent iterations of personal taste -- its theoretically possible that market demands don't care about narrative cohesion; that said, i think they probably matter more than they don't*

*it also should be said that this supposes that someone is able to secure a job in a creative position; while i stand by that narratives are present in all fields, it's probably true that narrative proficiency is more marketable in screenwriting than it is in McDonald's burger flipper.*

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      Now that I'm nearing the end of the post, I wonder: did i say anything? Who knows. But, yeah, narrative pros could probly sell themselves as such on the job market (though likely not in those exact/selfsame terms) and go places. But maybe I'm naive.

      Motivating this all is that I've been thinking about ways education needs to contend with the realities of the job market. One of my recent teachers in grad school has been very good about this -- giving unusual assignments and teacher unorthodox classes for the express purpose of that it will help you on the job market. And what in saying or proposing is that narrative is, for the time being, [something you can come back to whenever; versus things that might be more temporally contingent]. But then again, i don't know how one teaches narrative. And even though digital art and data analysis both have narratives, it's probably also the case that the ways their narratives operate are different. The last thing motivating this is big Joel's video covering every dcom. He speaks to the narratives of these films in prickly ways. When Joel narrates it, I believe that narrative can be sublime; that narrative is fluidic; that narrative world outside of time and is indeed transcendent. That's what he sold me on.

The end.

preface: while I was collecting my thoughts for this, it seemed like there could be some incongruities in terminology. I'm not that familiar with digital studies or whatever the associated field would be, so I don't know what terms people are using for to refer to different iterations of things. The motivation for this post is that I was thinking about adblock and felt it might be an instance where a person's relations to advertisements on the internet is more negotiable than it is in other contexts. In saying this, however, my thoughts immediately richocheted to the confined volatility of online games and game servers. These controlled ecologies generally can't be interfaced with any kind of adblock. My availability heuristics are of companies like Ubisoft and EA, which use isolate players on their servers and push predatory microtransactions.

     If I want to say that adblock represents something positive about a mode of engaging on the internet, it would be helpful to distinguish what it is that different about adblock applicable environs from isolated server spaces. As with most all things, there isn't a discrete binary between these spaces. That said, for the time being, I'll pretend that there are two modalities -- adblock applicable online spaces and non-opt outable ad having online spaces. (I focus on online because it's communication that in part happens on the end of the user's screen [on some level]; i feel like there's something in that localization that feeds into the types of relations online-mediated spaces can provide; the peer-to-peer-ness is what i'm gesturing at for what is potentially unique about online interaction). For the time being, I'll use "internet" to refer to spaces that can be adblocked and "server-sided" to refer to spaces that can't (which also have ads).

[^^ drawing of the uBlock origin icon, i guess threatening to shoot you ^^]

      My hypothesis, as I mentioned above, is that adblock is a means of disrupting digital capital (or at least resisting it). That web sites don't want you to use adblock (evinced by the popups you get when visiting, for example, certain news sites when using certain adblock extensions) is evidence only of that adblock threatens the monetary model that most web spaces are built on. This is because adblock is free software made by people to share with others to improve their quality of life (shared interest of a people to resist the interests of a capital owning class). As for the model I mentioned, it's characterized not only by the presence of advertisements in various forms as interventions onto the experience of using the web page (rather, this is the symptom), but also the preference for extracting value from users in ways that avoid requiring payment in the form of overtly symbolic value (money). While money is the most concentrated form of symbolic value in 2025, it is not the only iteration of symbolic value. Let's say value in this context is things which are produced via labor.

     As is likely well known by this point, it's common practice for web sites to use cookies and other extractive technologies to secrete information/data from users or other people that visit their sites. Within their monetary systems, these extracted resources are transformed (to varrying success levels) into capital; or, well, that's the end goal and desire. That web sites sell your data indicates that your data is valuable. If nothing else, the lengths to which companies and websites go to steal your personal information speaks to the extent to which the concentrated task of existing as a person (and more specifically, a person with habits and / or a history of actions and expressed desires) is labor.* While data may be valuable, it's value is not inherently capital value. Explicating the process which user browsing habits or personal information gets wrangled by companies or capitalists in the quest for making money is beyond the scope of this piece. (tbh i'm already well and truly erred of the path at this point lol).
*we can talk about different kinds of labor and that maybe we should have different words to sort these things out, but I don't really care to deal with that right now.

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      In any case, browsing the internet *is* labor (in some shape for form). Most present day discussions of "the algorithm" inherently circle the drain on this issue. YouTube and Netflix need you to browse their sites in order to operate. (I use "you" here not in the singular/specific sense but in the general/plural -- the point is that these institutions need people to provide them labor). In the same way that Subway (the sandwich place) doesn't need you individually as an employee but needs employees generally. This is why organized labor is said to threaten capitalists, as through actions such as striking, laborers can withhold their labor from the workplace... and with high enough numbers, the capitalist is no longer able to profit as there is no longer value to skim off. (Case in point for why browsing the internet is likely a different kind of labor than food service -- I'm not sure what an internet-located strike would realistically look like). I'm not an economist or anything, but this is how I understand things -- that, in general, organizing is anti-capital. This is relavent because I argue that adblock is one instance of organizing against capital (though, importantly, of a much more passive variety).

      In general, web sites are incentivized not to let you use adblock. Furthermore, Google's creeping attempts to delegitimize adblocks and root out their efficacy from Chrome and Chromium browsers demonstrates that such desires remain constant even at higher levels of technological abstraction. While WIRED's desire as a web site for me to not use adblock when reading their articles matters, this desire only really becomes meaningful when put in the context of the wider desires and demands of digital capital -- a.k.a. the inscribed monetary systems. Adblock threatens to delegitimize digital capital's enterprise. In order to obscure the threat that adblock poses to capital, though, digital capital incentivizes web sites (read: middle managers) to confront the individual people that visit them while using an adblocker. "Please disable adblock :( we're losing all our money otherwise :'^(" The rhetoric of anti-adblock pop-ups frames the technology as harmful and holds the right to entry hostage until users agree to cede their rights to not seeing ads/not having their data harvested.

      Now, of course, the ultimate culprit in this is the system of capitalism itself -- one where money and/or income is the price to entry (and what you're entering is the right/ability to live -- to have food, and shelter, and other stuff). In the extent to which it matters, capitalism is the violent party, not adblock. Even presuming that my using adblock prevents someone else from making enough money to buy food, it's still ultimately the system which is violent (and which is trying to translate a chance individual action into a supreme moral failure). Plus, also, if you want to talk violence and things which realistically could intervene in someone's ability to live, I think it's much more believable to call advertisements a threat/dangerous than any kind of adblock. To be reductive so as to leave things here -- the case in point example would be gambling or drinking ads; while gambling isn't necessarily harmful, my sense is that people who've been severely harmed by gambling addictions are at a much higher number than those slighted by people using adblock. But I suppose maybe we can never truly know...

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      The original point, I should get back to saying, is that compared to times square or a movie theater or some such, browsing the internet with adblock allows someone more of an option to not see ads. Adblock provides people terms (of negotiation) which are more localized and more controllable. You can't really opt out of billboards or other public image ads, but theoretically you can with digital ads via adblock. Similarly, if it's legitimate to compare between YouTube and movie theaters (no doubt this is a complicated comparison), then being on YouTube with adblock lets someone circumvent ads to a greater extent than is affordable in a movie theater. The main way to avoid ads in theaters is to disrupt the rhythm of spectatorship that the theater industry promotes for when and how long you should be there (i.e., if you arrive late and miss the previews).

      One thing it could be useful to compare would be: what are the ads present in these different places? My image of the archetypal theater advertisment is the trailers for movies that play before a feature starts. The general consensus for YouTube ads (which can be all manner of things, I'll touch on this later) is that people don't like sitting through them. Because of this, people frequently hover over the skip ad button until the second it becomes clickable, so that they can get back to the video as soon as possible. I don't actually have numbers, but this is what I do and this is what I've heard that other people do. Comparatively (using my mom as the example), my mom *loves* watching previews. She's expressed in the past that, if it were possible, she'd go to the theater to just watch trailers for two hours and be content to from there return home.

      I think it's probably important, within this whole discussion, to note that advertisements may have different functions depending on the place and time. In the case of the theater industry, trailers are fundamentally ouroborically oriented. Trailers are how the industry attempts to secure its longevity. They funnel the attention of paying spectators (people who are paying to come to this film; a more substantial cost than people who click on a YouTube video) into a kind of future-displaced cache/vye for credibility (read: previews are theaters attempting to translate the labor of spectatorship into value ... which they then hope to translate into capital when the spectators return in the future to pay the industry another visit). That previews tend to be of the same relative genre as the movie you're paying to see demonstrates this in a sense. As for YouTube... it's build different. In fact, YouTube's ad situation is so complex I can't confidently explicate it without giving a more detailed history in tandem (somethin beyond the scope of this piece). While theaters also have other ads beyond just previews (e.g., coca cola ads seem pretty common where I live), I think it's inarguable that the scope of the advertising ecology on YouTube completely eclipses the relatively self-contained theater advertising ecosystem. I mentioned YouTube's algorithm earlier, which is a prime example of how the personal profile created by and fed back into digital capital technology is used to inform what ads a person receives. The type of video someone clicks on also plays a role in what ads people see. Further, the economic standard currently has it that people often (on top of everything else) will take individual sponsorships/ad reads for their videos (what are a kind of targeted ad and a way in which capital attempts to circumvent adblock technology). I have many thoughts on much of this, but they are too garbled to try and assemble them further for now. (I'll leave it at this: the notion of an "adpocalypse," which was first proliferated in certain kinds of Gamer[tm] YouTube ecologies around 2016, demonstrates or speaks to a fascinating relation with advertisements, capital, and ... time?)

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      To close (and maybe recenter a little bit), it is that adblock is not alone in what powers it offers people to arrest for themselves from the binds and suffocations of capital. Two near analogs that have also come to mind are the practices of, technologies for, and sites of piracy and torrenting. Like adblock, these are -- more or less -- peer-to-peer means of disrupting capitalist modes of control. Now, is it ironic that it's best practice to use an adblock when visiting many a pirate streaming site? Maybe... but the economics of server maintenance while violating copyright are a conversation for another day.

     Motivating this is that, in looking for something to get me through the day while trying to adjust to the shocks of moving (my body has been in revolt; rest is not stomachable enough on its own), I've downloaded and started to play pokemon tcg pocket. I have many thoughts about it -- it's both more and less predatory marketed than duel links. While the simulation engine is sleek, the gameplay is only a chore (the sheared down size is an immense hindrance for pokemon, compared to yugioh). Etc etc. However, I will save the majority of those (some positive thoughts too) for another time. One day I might review more games...

[^^ image of the yugioh card 'rite of aramesir' ^^]

     Well, so, anyways, the point in mentioning this is that the game has gacha elements. As with all other gacha or gacha-like games I've played, I just stuck with what I was dealt, even though it has been semi sucky. I've never engaged in account rerolling, but I very much understand why people would (imo it's basically the same vibe as people who do coupon clipping for grocery shopping ). It's interesting in the sense that the systems of the gameplay (i.e., being a gacha)-- their very predatory marketing tactics (see folding ideas video on fortnite) are what produce this niche for of min maxing behavior and the culture which forms from it. An affect of capital, that is to say. Other motivating factors are the same general ways I think about language "corruption" etc., [retroactively see etymology nerd video on pidgin arabic-hindi dialect].

     Without further ado: there's a yugioh archetype based on isekai / gacha / rpg. Unlike most other archetypes in yugioh, this archetype doesn't have outwardly recognizable nomenclature for that would identify which cards qualify as this archetype (compare to, for example, pretty much all of the cards which have intended synergies with "blue-eyes white dragon" reflect their relation with names like "blue-eyes [xyz]" or "[xyz] with eyes of blue" etc. -- for more, see : https://yugipedia.com/wiki/Blue-Eyes). Rarher than share a common name, the isekai archetype is linked by that they all have effects that generate or interact with an "adventure" token (which represents the player character / person being isekaied). The isekai archetype cards are named as how they would be called within the context of their gacha / rpg / isekai world (e.g., "water enchantress of the temple").

[^^ drawing of the yugioh card 'rite of aramesir' ^^]

     This is all well and good. What I'm interested in here is that one of the main combo starters for the archetype, "Rite of Aramesir," has a name which is a pun on a japanese word, but the pun only works in English. That is, the pun plays on the english string of characters "aramesir." When reversed in english, the text becomes "risemara" -- (リセマラ) -- which is a japanese word for to describe the process of, when beginning a new gacha or rpg, resetting your account over and over again until you get a good start (the japanese term is a shortened play on "reset marathon"). In japanese, the card is also called "Aramesir 「blah blah blah」" (アラメシア「の儀」). However, because japanese characters work different from the roman alphabet, the reversed text would read "Asimera" (アシメラア), not "risemara" (リセマラ). To my knowledge the reversed japanese text is gibberish. While there may be a way of getting risemara from the original Japanese text (tbh i don't know much about japanese word play), I'm nonetheless fascinated that the pun on the japanese slang term only gets to be a pun when transcribed into english (whereupon it could only be made sense of as a pun if someone was already familiar with the term being referenced). I don't know what to do with this, but i find it curious.

     The yugioh wiki says that "The characters 「菈玛至崇颂」 (Lā mǎ zhì chóng sòng) in this card's Simplified Chinese are also an anagram of "reset marathon" (重置马拉松, Chóngzhì mǎlāsōng), written with homophonous characters." Which is interesting in it's own right. Word play, word play, word play... it so fun, it so intesting. Little guys on the page, prickling your brain

Writing this while very dehydrated and exhausted, on a moving train, so we'll see how this goes. (That i want to try to write regardless should say something about something, and hopefully not just about my foolhardy-ness)

     *Note at the top: I'm not linguistics person. I don't know much of the technical ways for thinking about these kinds of things. While I don't know how exceptional fnaf is for the things i want to talk about, it seems to me a very evocative site, and so I want to use it as an example. I have vague understanding of linguistics which has been produced by watching linguistics YouTube -- and more recently yt shorts -- over the last 5 or so years (tom scott. Jan misili, etymology nerd, other guy, k klein, etc...) see also indigo f and elf on shelf plural video. Anyways, here I go.

     Motivating this is also the eternal way In which I struggle to speak in ways that are understood by others -- in typing or in speaking out loud. (For various reasons; disability or not). Because I struggle to be understood, I'm interested in sites where language is mutated, eroded, or butchered (mutilated).

[^^ sketch depicting an image of relative language (version two) ^^]

      So, yes, now to fnaf. I've complained in many essays now about what I see as problems within the fnaf community (ways people communicate, trends in methodology, whatever talesgames and the whole book debacle counts as). While I probably stand by most of what I've said, i find that in retrospect I am not always as charitable as I could be. One thing that has been especially irksome for me is the way people are releasing videos every week saying they "SOLVED" FNAF, and then i click on the video and it's nothing, and I'm like, "??? wdym solved ??? This does nothing to address x, y, z." While i think my agitation here is valid and instructive in that it highlights, something, the reality is that the word SOLVED (even if in all caps and on the thumbnail with an arrow) doesn't have to mean the same thing for other people that I idealize it as meaning for myself. One way of moving away from my internalized understanding of the term (which associates it with, for example, solving a detective case -- ordering conclusively a chaotic narrative space) would be to think about the contexts people use the term. As indicated by an earlier parenthetical, one major context that I think it's worth giving mind to is that the word's use emerged from an especially online context, on YouTube. While FNAF has not been the only text that the word is applied to, it has a stronger relation to it than most other genres on YouTube. As a result, it can be useful to consider what FNAF is, now and in the past, and see when, where and how people are using the word for to talk about FNAF.

     In 2025, FNAF exists as a lucrative media mix, that is, FNAF doesnt exist as a singular text, genre or medium, but as a robust, interlocking system of media and genres. FNAF is two anthology book series published by Scholastic, FNAF is 2+ VR games published by Steel Wool Studios, FNAF is a series of exclusive licensing rights owned by Funko, YouTooz, etc. Etc. I use these terms to illustrate the ways FNAF is connected with capital. FNAF can't exist as a media mix unless people monetarily engage with FNAF the media mix, and so people do, see the many FNAF figurine reviews or the playthroughs of the Steel Wool era FNAF games.

     However, it's not enough to say that FNAF's relation to capital ends with the production of official FNAF-branded texts. The community and their labor are crucial elements of 2025 FNAF. While there are community members who engage with FNAF just because they like it (e.g., making fan art in their spare time), the largest pillars of the community are people who have a capital relation to FNAF. Theory videos are published on YouTube and earn money via AdSense. People stream on Twitch or YouTube and get ad money, but more often get money from donations. Even ignoring audience donations, though, FNAF is still historically lucrative. This profit (primarily im talking about ad money from youtube) then informs the culture. SOLVED signifies this. I guess clickbait would be a word to describe the phenomenon im talking about, but my image of clickbait has more negative connotations than what I mean to suggest. But then I think it's important to clarify that solved doesn't gain it's 2025 meaning over night -- it's meaning is the product of the iterative relation between people making videos about FNAF and the responsive growth and development of the FNAF media mix (thereby increasing the amount of things we can say solved of). The first several Game Theory videos about FNAF, for example, engage with the series much differently than the most recent Game Theory videos about FNAF. Whereas FNAF may have once been the trendy horror game of the season, FNAF grew to occupy a space of it's own and thus it's own media ecology (granted, it's still connected with external systems -- don't catch me with any of this hermeneutics shit,, not yet at least).

     What FNAF means to a given person at a given point in time is extremely contingent and bound to change. Therefore, even though the language that is used to address it (here, SOLVED) may stay the same, the meaning this language holds will inevitably change. The same word, SOLVED, can at different points signify an address to the past, the present or the future. For example, in the Johnny the nightmare video about SOTM (the one from before the trailer came out), he clarifies that when he uses SOLVED in the title that he has a specific working definition (which he explains) and that basically he's using it as evocative shorthand for to describe his synthesizing known information to guess what the upcoming game will be about. Other times, solved will be used for to order the chaos of the past or to steady out the tides of the present.

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     In saying all this, one thing that's interesting about the FNAF community, and maybe certain types of internet community in general, is that the community is, functionally, virtual. Virtuality informs communication. Where as communities that meet in church, for example, can see each other and communicate through speech or body language and other kinds of physicality, the virtual spaces the FNAF community primarily exists within privilege written and spoken communication -- the audio of theory videos and the written text of the comment section and title and description. Visual elements play a part too, but I reckon they are most relevant in how they manifest via thumbnails (thumbnails being a space where written text and visuality collide). These technologies and sites of communication inform how and what people communicate, something seen most readily by reemphasizing the importance of clickbait for to make money as someone posting videos about FNAF. The phrnomenon of clickbait incentives people to use easily legible and evocative language over arcane or mild language. Technically, someone could title a video "I wonder if it's relevant to the narrative of FNAF3 that there's seemingly a parallel to the Happiest Day minigame in one of the endings from the 2024 interactive novel, Return From the Pit." While they could do that -- and I honestly think that's kind of a heat title -- the demands of YouTube as a platform would vastly privilege the same video being titled "RETURN TO THE PIT SOLVES FNAF 3!?", for example.

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     However, I don't think clickbait is enough of an explanation for why the FNAF community has such an affinity for nonnirmative communication. Aside from solved, for example, the words "canon" and "continuity" are highly discoursed (and therein polarizing) within the community. As much as people may try to wipe the slate clean and go back to what these words mean in their dictionary definitions (no but seriously I've seen like 4 or 5 videos doing this), the ways the FNAF community uses these words is at once removed from their otherwise technical definitions and so ingrained within the community that linguistic intervention is all but impossible. By this i mean that at various points people have suggested other words be used instead or that people try to be specific when they use the terms so they don't mix messages, but then the tide comes back in and it's a removed chaos again. To clarify what I mean, canon generally is used outside of FNAF in two contexts -- for referring to biblical texts or for referring to the agreed upon standard suite of texts, such as what books are taught in high school or what Shakespeare plays are important to know about. (See: zoe bee's video about the complications embedded in demarcating the literary canon).

     For FNAF, canon means something like "official" or "certified." The term is evoked for when people try to determining which fnaf texts could be said to exist within an identical diegesis with which other ones. For example, the first fnaf game and the second fnaf game are generally both said to be canon -- even though they take place at different times, they ultimately exist within the same fictional world and are thus canonical. *to note, the question of canonicity is only really concerned with determining which texts (or parts of texts,,,) exist in the same world as the first fnaf game. With all of this being said, though, the term simultaneously has a different meaning which refers to anything that is within a Scott-authored FNAF-related diegesis. This definition is ostensibly the one that Scott uses-- in any case, he has a number of posts where he uses it in this way which people often reference back to for to recenter the conversation around.

     While this prescriptive use of the word was offered by the text's author, it is not the way the term is most frequently used (which is the first definition i outlined). Scott offers the word "continuity" to roughly mean what fans use canon to mean, i think-- though I also vaguely sense that people use it for to refer to what "Scott" uses canon for to refer to. The reason why these words are so contested is because canonicity in the first fnaf-related sense is very important to some fans. That is, because fnaf exists as such a media mix, and there are so many genre and media that fnaf coexists within, the series is not always precisely congrats with itself. For example, in the first fnaf book series, William afton doesn't have three children whereas most fans generally say that in the games he has three children, Michael, elizabeth, and the bitevictim (jury is out on what his name is). Fans say, then, that both of these can't exist at once simultaneously, and so one must be canon and the other, non-canon. The complications come, as I said, in that fnaf exists as so many different things from so many different authors. And so, canon, which essentially asks for there to be a singular author, can't contain everything that is fnaf (however this also means that it's never purely black and white what is canon and what isn't as the series' main author has also authored undeniably non-canon works -- such as freddy in space 2 and 3).

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     I think the language used by the fnaf community is interesting because it demonstrates the limitations of prescriptivism, and shows just how volatile and fragment language can be, or rather, truly is. The dictionary or encyclopedia claim to enshrined meaning, centralizing it in certain forms -- saying X means Y -- but then time and society and culture and people step in and the whole charade falls apart. At the same time, the fnaf community demonstrates that people generally don't communicate with meaningless signs. People try to communicate something specific-- people try to say what they mean. And sometimes that means inventing words. And sometimes that means making words yours. And sometimes that means that only a handful of people will understand you. And sometimes that means your future self won't understand you. And sometimes...

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     Yes. Invented words. This is another interesting face of the fnaf community. Because theory is such a big part of the community, people inevitably communicate about theories. And generally theories are complex -- they usually take the length of a youtube video to explain, after all. And so in order to signify the meaning of the theory without having to explain it everytime (and for to concentrate and calcify meanings within the community; invented language as a form of social control), people developed acronyms and shorthand names for referring to various theories and/or events/characters/elements from the series. Starting with the first FNAF game, people refer to the event the easter egg newspaper clips talk about (where five kids went missing at the pizzeria) as the MCI. 11 years later and there's now a bunch of acronyms -- some last and some are flash in the pan; some are widely used and some are niche. Aside from acronyms, the second kind of theory terminology is the shipname-style nomenclature people use to signify given theories. For example, TalesGames is a popular theory right now. It says that the tales from the pizza plex anthology stories happen within the games' timeline (i.e., are canonical in the first fnaf sense). While TalesGames may have had a specific meaning at first, it has since splintered into where now it's basically a bunch of different gremlins all bumbling about under the same trenchcoat that is "TalesGames" -- "why yes officer, it's just me, one person, no one else here.. why do you ask?"

     To explain: while it's true that the theory is that the tales from the pizzaplex anthology stories occur within the games' timeline, what this means is contested. Some people say all of the tales stories are canon while some say that only the short stories, "the mimic" and "the storyteller," and the mimic-related epilogues are canon. And then beyond this, people vary minutely in all manner of ways -- going back and forth on this and that short story. People use these theory names as shorthand in conversation with each other. I know mostly what the various theories are and where they came from but inevitably (since the fnaf community is so big), someone will use a theory name i hadn't heard before and I will be all taken out of it. Like, "???? I have noclu even what the words r that u r talking about." The most frequent culprit is "MoltenMCI Alter-S" -- like i legit have no clue what this is about and it's name is like three or four levels deep of fnaf terminology coalescing. The peculiarity of theory terminology motivated me to start working on a quiz show / trivia about them ,,, which I will finish one day. It's just so fascinating, no? (Prospective name for the quiz is "WAS THAT THE BITE OF 87!?").

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     While it's fun, in a certain way, to point at the peculiarity of how fnaf fans communicate about the series or their theories, it's important to remember that it comes from cultural and temporal contexts which inform what it looks/ed like and how it develops/ed. The phenomenon of ship names, for example, is an important context to bring in when making sense of how theory names look the way they do. Ive done less work thinking about theory terminology than "solved," so I can't as confidently point to all the factors I think may be informing what the communication looks like (and what it communicates). That said, it's hard to imagine that similar contexts of youtube as a platform for communication and that legibility on the internet can coincide with experience-- these likely also inform this language.

     Or, to put it more harshly (aka tl;dr):

     Words lose meaning. Become so fractured. Niche into niche. Subcultures that don't even know they are living together, using the same tongues... Issues of both direct, prescriptive intervention and also a lack of prescriptive intervention... Ideas become embedded in words so violently that the ideas are shredded away and the words stand alone. And then those words become ideas and get embedded elsewhere, etc.

Writing this while very dehydrated and exhausted, on a moving train, so we'll see how this goes. (That i want to try to write regardless should say something about something, and hopefully not just about my foolhardy-ness)

     *Note at the top: I'm not linguistics person. I don't know much of the technical ways for thinking about these kinds of things. While I don't know how exceptional fnaf is for the things i want to talk about, it seems to me a very evocative site, and so I want to use it as an example. I have vague understanding of linguistics which has been produced by watching linguistics YouTube -- and more recently yt shorts -- over the last 5 or so years (tom scott. Jan misili, etymology nerd, other guy, k klein, etc...) see also indigo f and elf on shelf plural video. Anyways, here I go.

     Motivating this is also the eternal way In which I struggle to speak in ways that are understood by others -- in typing or in speaking out loud. (For various reasons, Disability or not). Because I struggle to be understood, I'm interested in sites where language is mutated, eroded, or butchered (mutilated).

[^^ sketch depicting an image of relative language (version one) ^^]

     I drafted these thoughts last night but they've been bouncing around here and there for quite a bit beforehand. Before I get into fnaf, I want to touch on another instance of destabilized meaning i came across while going through the dregs of my watch later play list this morning. When talking about language being destabilized, or new words developing, my image is usually of minoritized, marginal, or otherwise niche, disempowered cultural spaces -- black vernacular english/ebonics, various queer slang and other sorts of code switching. Considering these cases is important and the subversion these cultures act out is meaningful, but i think it's also valuable to point out instability that permeates even within spaces that counterpose this type of culture. The video from this morning was about, in different ways, so-called culture war spaces of the right (there were actually two videos, the first about the daily wire and Brett Cooper and the second about the critical drinker and what I'll call the descendents of gamer gate). The youtuber, jose, emphasized ways that the people he was talking about engaged with different levels of signification (including, for example, using dog whistles) in how they made meaning with their arguments or videos. For example, in the daily wire video, jose discussed how Brett Cooper uses a news story about fraternity members who protected a flag pole flying the US flag, thereby silencing protesters who were trying to fly a Palestinian flag. Jose talk in this case how the contested meaning of the American flag allows Brett Cooper to smuggle conservative argumentation into her rhetoric and allows the fraternity members to have at once pro-israel and both sides people within their ranks.

     The American flag, for jose, ostensibly stands for freedom and yet, and yet. And yet the fraternity members were acting to suppress another group's freedom of speech. For jose, this indicates that at some level someone doesn't understand what the signifiers are standing for, or are otherwise acting hypocritically (hose doesn't say this directly, this is what I'm dividing from what he says). In the second example I will touch upon, jose discusses how the critical drinker fails to understand what exactly he's talking about, giving first examples of how he (the critical drinker) said something was the case about the one piece live action adaptation that was not actually the case (as evidenced by jose by his supplying of additional research into the production circumstances of the show that the critical drinker had guessed at/assumed about). Later in the video, and this is the bit that is actually what I want to introduce this essay with, jose points out that in the critical drinker's video on echo (a marvel series?), the critical drinker misuses the term "girlboss" for to describe the main character and her actions. Actually, jose says, she and the show provide anti-girlboss narratives. For jose this indicates that the critical drinker doesn't understand the terminology he uses, and especially not in the ways that his opponents undetstand it (e.g., that leftists are often not actually pro-girlboss).

     Ealier in the video, jose comments on that the critical drinker uses a "triggered lib"-type image for to depict the fact that the one piece live action remake's feminist politics (the lack thereof, according to the critical drinker), would probably make feminist types angry, something he takes pleasure in. Jose suggests that the fact that the critical drinker uses a signifer (image) that points still back to 2016, that this may suggest that what the critical drinker is talking about is not necessarily real as the world exists at the point when he was making his video. I think this point is important and worth being attended to further -- indeed, it seems like there are several ways in which certain conservative groups have remained conservative in their use of images and are thus in discourse with a fictive version of the world. However, I think that something is fictive does not inherently make it meaningless. This relates to the girlboss comments since, even though the use of the term was also in a fictive / separated from reality kind of way, it still points at something. (To be clear, I'm not trying to suggest that jose is saying that folx are talking in empty signifiers).

     I want to hold on this and make sure I get it across well, as this relates inextricably to where I intend to go with my fnaf discussion. The critical drinker uses "girlboss" to derogatorily describe the fmc's actions -- esp her fighting prowess as a woman being conceived as disproportionate to the men she beats up. He's talking about something when he says this. He uses the same word that people elsewhere (in space, in time) may use to describe, for example, Elizabeth Holmes or Melinda gates, but he does not deploy it with the same meaning. The word is the same but the meaning is not. Context informs a word's meaning, yes, but this doesn't necessarily help. I would argue the fictive signification of the critical drinker's use of girlboss is important for what he's talking about. Even if he would say he's interested in realism or what not, he cannot mean this word in the literal way that i mean it. Because right wing discourses around mainstream culture are reactionary, and therefore conservative and ouroboric, words will inevitability collapse in on themselves or otherwise be turniketed from their originating contexts. Language endures a violent pummeling. Scylla and charybdis is how language always works -- Branching paths, pirouettes, etc. From an outsider like myself or jose looking in, it's easy to say that these people are using their signs improperly -- that they don't know what they are talking about, or are uninformed. Maybe that's true, but i suggest it can never be fully true.

     The critical drinker uses English words to speak, he uses his words and his mouth and his tongue. The words he uses, more often than not, he did not invent. He inherited his language. He uses the words and sounds and signs he inherited and continues to inherit try to signify,,, something. While I don't want to say that he doesn't know what he's talking about, I will intervene and say that he's speaking about a fictive imagination. In the same way that the "modern girl" never existed in Korea or Japan but in the minds of the misogynist men who invented and bemoaned about her (never = not in the ways the men speak about the figure), the critical drinker's girlboss doesn't exist in flesh. I wonder if the fact that the critical drinker is more observable engaging with planes of fiction (e.g., sci fi and fantasy pop culture audio visual media culture) affects how people understand his signs.

I wrote a whole thing last night about how my body is a writhing mass of eels right now, but I decided to take it down since it was maybe more dramatic than it needed to be and stuff. I'll probably try to reconstitute it into a poem or two. But that's besides the point for the here and now.

     I want to write about AI. My want in this case wells up both from within myself and from the social contexts I am weathered within (i.e., this cursed online and offline media ecology that imagines AI as an omnibus villain of visual media onto which any sin can be readily transposed).

     This post is motivated by a video essay I watched earlier today, "The Trans Debate: Political Science vs. Autotheory," by Marceline🦋. I wasn't familiar with Marceline beforehand (I found the video on my front page), thought I was somewhat familiar with the topics she was talking about. Overall, I thought the video was incredibly well done in many ways. The part that's relevent here is that Marceline argues that autotheory (I love the way she says it; it's very likely that i will unconsciously mimic her in this regard) may be valuable in part because there are dimensions of transness that it can make readable which are otherwise simply illegible to the traditional mechanisms of (political) scientism. Studies can be helpful, but they should not be held as the sole determinant of truth and objectivity, Marceline argues. Through autotheory, then, a trans woman can speak truth to the ways their specific circumstances have intersected with power systems, gender, etc. Instead of waiting for the day when a study comes along to definitively fix (i.e., fasten) how it is that people "become trans" (so to speak), autotheoretical matrices allow people to take action and gain insights in the here and now which can have observable positive impact on the lives of trans people.

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     I want to hang onto this notion that different methodologies make different elements visible (in ways that require different methodologies to see more elements) and try and wrangle it into the contours of the media studies concept of "medium specificity." In essence, medium specificity makes a parallel argument -- it says that each medium has things which it can do and things it cannot, i.e., painting is more suited to one kind of expression and written poetry to another. I've traditionally been of two minds about the concept. On the one hand, I think I agree that, yeah, novels and youtube shorts possess different capacities of meaning making, on the other, the historical maelstroms which have always been dog-eared onto medium specificity render the practical applications of the concept rather conservative. Medium specificity most frequently comes up in discussions within literature and film departments. At the beginning of the 20th century, when literary works were getting adapted to (silent) film, you have a number of authors from this time period (e.g., Virginia Woolf) writing complaints that the new medium is stepping on literatures toes -- why can't it do it's own thing, why can't it go and bother theatre and leave the sacred literary canon alone, etc. etc. This debate died down after a time as film for various reasons was simply here to stay and likely had too much capital sway to lose steam on its way to progress. Well, come the end of the 19th century, and the discourse erupts again, but this time it's the film folk saying that this new guy -- video -- is harshing their vibe. Now you have waves of scholars writing about how digital media is fundamentally broken and will only ever be a failed simulacrum of film's truly transcendent and necessary potential. To source their claims, scholars often turned to the semiotic concept of indexicality, saying that the filmic apparatus (the way films are shot, edited, and exhibited) has ineffable tethers to the elusive, but powerful sign that is the index (there are several types of indices and they all get attributed to film; most generally, though, you can think of an index as a pointing finger, something which indicates the existence of something else). Video fails to have an index and thus video is the half-child limping along in succession, uttering only wilted murmers of mimicry. I am being sensationalist here and presenting a straw man, but I don't think it's that far off from what scholars were saying. However, the argument about video is not only that it's a half-image (this is what some Japanese theoreticians call it), but also that its existence extemporaneously stains the veracity of film. Because video is reproducible and nonindexical and because video images are not visually that dissimilar from filmic images, people will lose trust in filmic images and thus the whole enterprise of the indexical filmic image (which at this point gets held as ransom against the weight of believing in something like history) becomes threatened in its entirety.

     I haven't been in the academy for 20 years or however long these discourse have been happening, but the arguments that I see scholars make in articles published around the turn of the 21st century and that I hear scholars make (i.e., in-person) today are, for all intents and purposes, overlapping with another. This constant worry that the advent of digital is but the mists of doom rolling in, filmic apocalypse right around the corner-- it seems like the worry persists but has yet to be meaningfully proven true (there are still film departments and except for exceptional cases digital media is but an addendum in academic spaces).

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     While the arguments have remained relatively the same, the media they negotiate over has been in a rapid flux -- this is most readily the case with digital. Most recently, the mainstream public perception of digital image technology has mutated in the wake of the proliferation of AI image technology. Most recently, that is, I hear (both within the academy and from outside it) people harbinging that AI image technology is the death of the digital image. Because of the existence of AI images (that AI images are known to be something that *can* exist), people go as far as to try and persecute digital artists they perceive as using AI image technology (whether they actually do or not). On the one hand, this would seem to affirm what film academicians have predicted for so long -- that advances in image technology threaten the sanctity of the enterprise (people lose faith).

     I don't really care about AI image technology -- it doesn't bother me in the ways I see people fearmonger about it -- but I've struggled to come up with a framework for arguing my position. (This is not really what I mean but I will pretend for the moment that it is). I think that Marceline's framing of the debate between autotheory and (political) science can serve as a useful overlay for letting me express what I think I'm trying to get across. The crucial first step to this is the acceptance of the ability for multiple perspectives to exist at once. While Marceline contests some of the claims that scientism makes (in general and with the specific study she's talking about), she doesn't seem to indicate that she's against the enterprise entirely. In fact, she collaborates with a biologist (a science field) to help explain a topic that she doesn't have as much of the prior knowledge on (gene mutation stuff etc.). Extending from this, I want to emphasize that I am not against any media technology or any type of image. While I contest film scholars' ontology of film, I don't wish to melt the flesh of the thing itself. It can vibe off in the corner, I don't care. Instead, I think it could be helpful to see the advent of new imaging technology, as with the advent of new theoretical methodology in the case of autotheory, as a way in which the capacities of the image, in general, expand. If autotheory indeed allows theoreticians to make visible experiences otherwise invisibilized by the dominant methodologies, I am suggesting that new image technology such as video or AI can make obtainable meanings otherwise unobtainable by the dominant image technologies. One of the major points wielded against AI art is that it looks yucky and bad and dumb -- that it fails to mimic the meanings available in an evidently authored work of art. While personal taste exists and should be taken into consideration for some kind of calculus, I feel like this argument is not sufficiently substantive. This argument presupposes that visibly authored meanings are the only valid meanings. One counter example (which does not operate in the same way as AI image meaning making, but which is a counter example nonetheless), is the images preeminent in forests. While nature photography and landscape paintings represent ways in which authors can superimpose themselves onto a forest space, I argue that forest spaces possess meaningful images even before they are captured or interfaced with by external authors (assuming the viewer doesn't count as an author) or image technologies. I personally have had meaningful experiences while in the woods. While this argument can be contested by talking about the authorial role people may have in shaping forest images, such as via landscaping or trailblazing, I feel that these person-originated interventions can never be wholly occluding (the settler is never complete in their dominance, there will always be a remainder). In other words, while I'm not hopping on here to say that AI images are peak, I think it's probably naive to say that they are failed images (less even than the half-image of the nascent digital).

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     Some ways AI images could potentially open up avenues of meaning making are via contesting such enterprises as history, copyright, and the original/source. AI images come from somewhere, no doubt about it. We can ask questions about what databases certain image technologies are drawing from and whether these images may be limited in the scope of what they can image. I'm not trying to say that AI image technology is perfect or without harm (though I think its harm is often overstated). But even though they come from somewhere, they don't share hardly anything of an identifiable trace (another name for an index) for where *precisely* they came from. According to one of my teachers last semester (who was a lovely person and an overall great person), this total lack of trace/index threatens to obliterate the meaning of history. If people are raised in a world where AI images exist in the mainstream, what use do photographs hold anymore? As an example for why this matters, my teacher talked about how photographs were used as evidence of the atrocities the Nazis committed during WWII, providing visible traces of the bloodstained evil that the Nazis had on their hands. Had photography not been the dominant image technology (for stationary images), then maybe these Nazis would not have been able to be punished for their sins -- maybe Holocaust deniers would be functionally vindicated. Generally I'm wary of these strong hypotheticals which assume bad faith. At the same time, it's undoubtable that what my teacher is worried about is attached to a real anxiety. It wouldn't be helpful, for example, were I to reply, "no that wouldn't happen, lol." Instead I want to suggest that images don't offer meaning only in how they correlate to history. While it seems like photography is rooted in history (this is potentially arguable as part of this claim stems from the belief that the photons from the initial event get inscribed exactly as they are in the photograph, something which just isn't true), AI images evidently are not (given that we define history in the indexical way that the media studies people are wanting to talk about). The lack of a historical root is not intrinsically a bad thing, I would say. At a certain level (maybe this is a straw man), film's (speaking here doubly about photography) root in history is also a root in institutions of authorship and copyright. Since essentially the beginning of film history, people have used film as an arena for flexing ownership (and thus capital) to the express demise or limitation of their peers. See, for example, Thomas Edison (famously scummy guy) who settled himself in film history not only in his patenting of film technology (cameras and film stock etc.) but also in his monopolization of films -- he flooded the market with Edison productions (some original and some foreign imports that he clipped off the title credits and replaced with his name). Edison used film to expressly enact tactics of predatory capitalism. While histories of independent film production exist, the largest players in the medium have always been studios -- and what is Hollywood if not a synecdoche for the evils of present day capitalism.

text to break up the flow; maybe to come back with an image in its stead later

     Therefore, when AI images are temporally volatile and are sourced from large databases of potentially copyrighted works, the image technology necessarily contests the singularity of copyright and authorship as the sole channels of legitimating (aka giving meaning to) an image. AI images are not illegetimate because they "steal art," they are legitimate in spite of this fact. Arguing otherwise duplicates a capitalist logic which sanctifies history and entrepreneurial genius. Yeah. That's most of what I had to say. But for the final nail in the coffin, I'll try to connect this with digital image technology as well. While digital images have not usually been paraded with the same certainty of authorship and historicity as filmic or photographic images, there has nevertheless developed a culture of declaring authorship into digital images. It's within these cultural contexts that "tracing" is seen as an explicit faux pas and sign of a morally failed artist. If it comes out that some artist X was tracing the art of artist Y, there are more than a handful of documented cases where public outrage at artist X for their discovered sins has grown to the point that artist X deletes their social media and retreats from the public eye. Of course, then, AI images are threatening in such a cultural climate. While AI images are largely non-indexical, depending on the databases they draw from, a knowing eye can spot what artists or artworks an AI image technology was trained on / is drawing from -- that is, a knowing eye can say that AI images are tracing. Unfortunately for these art sleuths, tracing is not a primordially immoral act. Images can be produced via tracing. The fact of tracing does not negate an image's image-ness. This is not to say that tracing is fundamentally good, but that traced art and non-traced art offer different avenues of meaning making. In other words, AI images move all the way through the petty squabble of tracing litigation to offer a type of image which is theoretically ONLY produced via tracing-approximate methodologies. This new image then offers a different kind of meaning making from a digital art produced without tracing (which values singular authors of distinct style and figure).

     To close out, accepting all of this requires a shift not only in the way artists and scholars conceive of images, but of the way the people conceive of images as meaningful. Pornographic images mean something different than anatomical diagrams or CCTV footage. Maybe some image technologies produce certain meanings easier or make available the production of new meanings. If companies (like Hollywood, for example) using AI to replace workers is evil, it is not because AI is evil in and of itself, but because companies are evil and anti-worker and probably it's fair to say anti-person. The Disney plus Marvel whatever show that used AI images in it's opening sequence (the secret war?) or the Coca Cola advertisement that used only AI images-- these are not morally wrong (if they can be said to be so) because they are AI, but because they are instances of corporations using technologies to displace their workers. That the technology is AI is incidental. While the extent to which corporations have invested in AI is indicative of something, I don't believe it inherently indicts the medium in and of itself. Each medium is specific. Let the protuberances grow into their own spires -- things don't always need to be stuffed into the same crystalline towers all the time.

     Motivating this post (beyond these topics being things I perennially think about, anyways) is that I finally got around to watching the latest of Jacob Geller's “Fear of ___” series, (here, “Fear of Dark”). In it (“Fear of Dark”), he talks about the movie Skinamarink, drawing attention to how the it uses digital cinematography to accentuate the way shooting in poorly lit environments at a high iso causes the camera to perceive or record a kind of static/noise artifacting in the darkness. (I haven’t seen the movie, but I assume what he’s saying about it holds true). Geller wonders if this can be said to constitute the machine (i.e., the digital camera) hallucinating. After bringing it up, though, he largely drops the question and moves elsewhere. Geller’s posing of the question connects to a larger throughline in his video of what the fear of dark looks like, at a psychological/phenomenological level. That is, that the fear of dark generally breaks down into a dichotomy, fear that there is something there (in the dark) or that there is nothing there. In the former case, Geller talks about various examples of how people hallucinate sounds and images when in darkness, or onto dark spaces.

     I want to return to the ideas Geller turned over as they are things I've thought about myself for some time. In my own audio visual work, when I shoot the footage myself, I have so far always used my phone (a digital camera) to do so. While I don't necessarily have alternatives readily available to me, I appreciate the medium's quirks and generally attempt to accentuate or play with them in my work. While I more frequently play with my phone’s digital zoom and the artifacting produced therein, I’ve also tinkered with my camera’s treatment of darkness. Aside from this interest based in practice, I’m also interested in the topics of hallucination and pareidolia in general.

[^^ drawing of the Hearthstone card "Spore Hallucination" -- called "Hallucination" until 2025-01-21 ^^]

     One thing I often come back to in my thinking on hallucinations and pareidolia is to what extent these phenomena should be considered separate from their medical contexts. I don't personally have experience living with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder (etc.), and I'm not completely caught up on the DSM’s taxonomy for conditions which relate to these things (these things = hallucination + pareidolia) / the DSM’s working definitions for what constitutes these things in and of themselves. If possible, I want to avoid reproducing sanist stereotypes or bigotry, especially of the type which I perceive as prevalent in 2025’s internet media ecology. I hope to speak about these subjects in ways that don't enter into derogatory or which enter the use of slurs, but I don't have a solid sense of where the line of acceptability lies. (I.e., I know well enough to avoid using the most common slurs, but I don’t have enough of an education on the best ways of talking about these topics).

     (Part of what I haven't been able to tell, for example, is to what extent Guattari and Deleuze's framework of schizophrenia plays into or against these systems; for whatever it counts for, G+D’s 1000 Plateaus – the book where G+D outline their understanding of Schizophrenia – was a popular text in Japan in the 1980s, and the ways people were talking about it there at that time used what in English would now be considered slurs;; but that’s besides the point, I’ll talk about G+D some other time).

     In saying all of this, part of what I want to move toward thinking about is to what extent these phenomena are literal (and must be understood literally) and to what extent they can productively be understood as metaphorical (as well as to what extent the boundary between the two lies as blurry).

[^^ drawing of the Balatro joker "Pareidolia"^^]

     On a literal level, it may be false to say a camera hallucinates, given that hallucination is understood as a uniquely psychological effect (since in this framework the camera does not have a psychology). However, I think trying to determine where hallucination is located may not be a fully productive act. Motivating my thinking is that in order for someone to declare something a hallucination, the declarative party must possess a psychology, therefore, it is impossible to address hallucination/to think about it in a way distended from psychological bodies. I wonder if it could be useful to think of it as though through declaration of the hallucination, the speaker relocates it, in part, to themselves, given that they are the one who comes to understand it as such.

     Strictly speaking, hallucination and pareidolia are not things in and of themselves, rather they are semiotic ways of being and relating to meaning. They can only be said to exist when signification happens between units. (I say this hesitantly in some regard as it seems like these definitions are inching towards a kind of anthropocentrism – something I am wary of; However, I don’t know how else to frame things at the moment).

     I am not interested in saying if hallucinations are real or not. Rather I want to emphasize that they come from a kind of discrepancy, something is/becomes something else. In this way, I view pareidolia and hallucination as transformative, and therefore generative matrices of interacting with the world and of making meaning.

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     On the extreme end, where one accepts that non-humans can hallucinate, I would say machines often hallucinate, especially in computer science fields. Most AI image technology, for example, engages in these practices when it generates something (an image) out of noise – hallucinating into random chaos an image with a subject (that's not noise, that's big tit goth girl at the pool, etc). This is more easily seen with earlier versions of AI image technology, where, for example, you could take the spotty output of the technology trying to hallucinate a dog from noise, and feed it back into the machine, but as data and telling it that it's actually a jellyfish (thus doubling or more the hallucinogenic effect, creating something out of nothing). This accelerates reading meaning into chaos in a demonstrably visible manner.

     Continuing, camera hallucinations, like the kind Geller talks about, observe and generate something too. One could say, for example, that they speak to the air of movement nascent in space and darkness themselves. Cameras have always been able to see in a way that humans do not. Most human eyes with with a different focal length than what most cameras use (e.g., generally the human eye lens is locked at around 24mm [iirc], whereas cameras go all over the place, can toggle between focal lengths, and can go up to 600+mm, seeing things almost impossibly far away). Cameras see the world with a fundamentally different kind of distortion. From a kind of objective perspective, digital noise does not inherently contain meaning; it is data read out from a machine / produced by a machine. Human spectators are the ones who assign meaning to it, via watching it. Imagining movement and time means imaging meaning.

     I believe this is what pareidolia fundamentally is – seeing something into something where it is not there in that same capacity for others. When I frame pareidolia this way, I intend to draw a comparison to kinds of literary analysis and interpretation of a text.

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     Since my current hyperfixation remains FNAF, and I feel that FNAF provides an evocative subject to reflect what I’m gesturing at, I’ll use it here as my example. The games themselves (and the other FNAF content), say things and contain things. They do so, however, in a restrained kind of way where they don’t say what exactly they are saying. While there are general points of consensus within the FNAF community, the texts explicitly state a comparative dearth of what can be said to be lore, story, or narrative. In this way, any kind of narrative that someone reads into the text, especially if it’s a complex one, will likely, almost necessarily, be hallucinating something into it which was not innately present.

     Because we cannot know what other people know, we cannot know in the moment of seeing or thinking if our senses are hallucinations. I say this since, contrary to the concept of digital cameras, where you can cross reference what the camera sees with what you see (*to be annoying this is false, impossibly so; but we pretend otherwise for argumentative convenience), it is relatively difficult if, if not impossible, to compare something approaching the “Truth” to someone’s interpretation, narration, or imagination of an event or moment.

     In the case of FNAF, Scott, the generally agreed upon authorial voice, is fairly cloistered with regard to saying what he’s cooking or what he means when he signifies something. I wonder if this example could help demonstrate the relativity of truth and of hallucination. Under this framework, hallucination is defined as happening when something occupies a minority position with regard to the majority (terms defined not numerically but by proximity to evental origination and to power). If it’s not possible to know what the majority is (much less to verify it in any external kind of way), then it becomes a taller ask to verify something as a hallucination or not.

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     There's something personal and indulgent in pareidolia and hallucinations. They are phenomena through which orders a chaotic world (sometimes volitionally, sometimes not). While I would say this is not inherently good, I would also say it's not inherently bad. There are limits to fiction and the unreal, but they can't ever be fully opted out of. The world is chaotic, but it's never fully chaotic. Flexing agency is selfish, but it's also self-affirming.

     With all of this idyllicness being said, though, I wonder how much the possibility of theoretical bad actors using the blamelessness afforded by hallucination to smuggle guilt out of their actions is something that should be considered for within this whole calculus. I think it's useful to respect a kind of truth in certain cases, e.g., truths about what being trans is and what trans people, on the whole, get up to. That someone thinks trans people are groomers or rapists or... is divorced from what the lived realities of trans people are (indeed these anti-trans narratives are phantasmatic as Judith Butler would have it; I think this could be a way of demarcating hallucinations that makes what I'm trying to talk about less potentially messy). There's a difference between opinion and hallucination, probably, but I think something like this example could fit what I'm trying to get at.

     I wondered while writing this if power dynamics could be a relevant dimension for litigating / evaluating the question of hallucinations and pareidolia. When hallucinations victimize oppressed peoples, there is a stake in weighing against or dispelling them. I also think there's a difference in hallucinations about people and their characters and hallucinations about fiction (e.g., fnaf and its story). That is, I think there's probably room for separating between fiction and nonfiction. That said, this is always a slippery slope, and ordering nonfiction is a more precarious gesture than ordering fiction.

     At the same time, I don't want for the potential of bad faith actors to encroach on what's at stake for oppressed people who experience these phenomena. Sanism, as I mentioned, is still societally common and sanist slurs are the most common slurs I hear used online (not to say they are the most severe, just the most frequent). (I mean something by this but I maybe can't explain neatly the exact calculus I'm guesstimating in my head).

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     Anyways. I think there's a lot to chew on here. I am excited by the potentials of digital technologies and I think they provide evocative sites for people to play with fundamental phenomena of being people (e.g., digital as a medium for to work through the intricacies of fiction ...)

     Try it out some time (it here being both the use of digital camera technology and the phenomena of hallucination and pareidolia). Or not, up to you 😀. But that's why I use pareidolia as my video essayist moniker last name

I have tried writing variations of this for over half a decade at this point. I'm feeling spirited now, so i will take another pass at it.

     This essay is about how I understand fiction and what I perceive its boundaries to be. My thinking on fiction is informed by many things. I've tried for years to precisely articulate that genealogy, but it always spirals out into nothingness (or a semester-late final paper, but we don't talk about that). The biggest inspiration I usually cite is Michael Haneke's "Funny Games" and especially the reading Patricia Taxxon offers of the film and what it says about fiction and its inextricability from authoredness (and what that means for the limitations of fiction). The words to render all of this-- I haven't found them yet. But since they're (the film and the video essay) important (to my thinking), I'll still give you a couple (of words).

     Taxxon uses the metaphor of power scaling debates to describe how fiction functions. In power scaling, a genre of YouTube video and otherwise internet-located discussions which seek to procure a kind of scientism for the strengths of characters within and across media (usually this centers Superhero or Shounen media). Taxxon contests the genre's premise saying that such a framework of objectivism fails to address the realities of fiction. That is, fiction is not real, it is constructed and it is located elsewhere (in neurons, for example). Following from this, Taxxon says that the winner between Goku and Superman (I don't remember the exact analogy it uses, but it's something like this) depends on who's writing the fiction. Because fiction is not intrinsically bound by physics, the motivations and actions and mechanical properties of a given fictional world operate as the author describes them to (explicitly or not). Goku wins if an author describes that to be the case, Superman if the opposite is the case. Because authors can invent any fiction, objectivist litigations maybe don't make sense within their contexts.

[^^ drawing of Patricia Taxxon and Freddy sitting together ^^]

     My recent thinking about fiction has largely centered around FNAF. I've also been thinking about other fictional worlds such as Pokemon. The issue that I've been coming back to is the issue of history. The history of the world I live in is multitudinous in all kinds of different ways, but, regardless, the relevant point is that it's series of contained events led to today, causing things to be the ways that they are. Maybe I don't believe this precisely and there's room to contest this statement as to what causality means and what history means, but for this essay, these questions are not relevant right now. Anyways, given the complexities of the history of the world that I live in, what does it mean when a fictional space looks different (i.e., exists)? The biggest recent example would be the recent COVID-19 pandemic (which is still ongoing-- but again, besides the point). Fictions which narrate a temporal space that includes 2020 or 2021 ought to bump up against the histories and realities of COVID, but I think they don't always do so. Lacking concrete examples, my sense is that instead of the realities of history, some general vague image (maybe similar in name to the history of this world) is appended to the functioning space of these fictions. *the point on pokemon is not related to history. i'll touch on it briefly at the end.

[^^ drawing of orange guy / william afton as funny games home invader ^^]

     With this alone, there are many ways to take things. Since my thinking has been caught on FNAF, I'll explain where I've been getting with regard to fiction, history, and FNAF. Whether it's unique to FNAF discursive spaces or not I can't say, but anyways because of the prevalence of a certain mode of theorization for interacting with FNAF's texts and playing with their fictional worlds, historical details variously enter as relevant or non-relevant to assessing some given point. For various reasons, creating timelines of when events and games in the series happen is a popular genre of theory in the FNAF community. Taking the first game (FNAF) as an example, people disagree on when this game takes place. Some popular candidates include 1993, 1992, 1989, 1998, 2003, among others. (One reason why there's so many theorized dates for when this game takes place is due to the fact that the series has been going on for 10+ years, and thus many different numbers have been thrust into the FNAF temporal milieu, which then you pick and choose which ones you're working with for how you come to a given conclusion). A frequent device people use to place FNAF games is to compare the paycheck you receive at the end of the game (in the first two games) to the national or state minimum wage in Utah in a given year. For FNAF 2, if you do a calculus that ignores tax, you get the 1987 on the dot, which the game confirms as well. I use this example to say that people use facts or trends of the history of the world I live in to assess the events of the fictional world(s) of FNAF. I wonder if this is so simple, though.

     Especially within the last two or so years, this methodology has become increasingly tenuous, in my opinion, as the series continues to chew up temporal space into BOTH the past AND the future of its fictional history. See, for example, that the next FNAF game to come out seems to be set in 1979 whereas the previous one (made by Steel Wool) was set at least in 2020 (we think..). With (FNAF's fictional) history becoming more and more divergent (from the history of my world), how useful is historical comparative analysis? In the extreme, I want to say that it's basically invalid. But if I really think about it, I guess that doesn't make sense. Thinking this way duplicates the logic of power scaling objectivism that I earlier dismissed. But I also think it's naive to use it completely unchanged. Nevertheless, there has to be some way in which surmising information about the fictional world based off of how things played out in the real world ceases to be generative / meaningful. Of course, people are free to engage with fiction using whatever frameworks they want, but what I'm saying is I predict diminishing returns. The difficulty, though, is what to do with a fiction that tells you it's a betrayal while also having a history of telling you it's a replica, and of relying on you (you = FNAF community) to pick up on the fact that it is as such (a replica) for to make meaning from the text. That is, the difficulty is that the games continue to emphasize dates and time periods which approximate ones that exist in the world I live in, in ways that suggest that the games are trying to say something with things happening at those dates or times, while also ignoring genealogies which brought the histories of this world into being.

     In essence, I want to know how things came to be this way. This chair I'm sitting in is made of plastic and metal and fabric -- these materials came from somewhere, the chair was manufactured somewhere. The words I use to speak were handed down to me. The language I use has a history of connotations and mutations. The technology I write this on-- there's a history undergirding that too-- how it got here, how it works, etc. There are chairs in FNAF and so I must assume that people make chairs in the world of FNAF. But we don't see this. The fiction does not explicitly orate this, so it's possible that it isn't true. It's possible that in the fictional non-reality non-historical space of FNAF, chairs simply come into being. Fiction does not tell you the terms it is working with-- there is no fiction that does this as it would be impossible to fully explicate how the world that a fiction resides in is chemically, mechanically, mathematically (etc.) identical with the operations of the world(s) of those who engage with it. How do they learn to speak. But this doesn't matter. Because fiction isn't real. And that means something. There's a cost to fiction, yes, but it's not a cost written in flesh and history. It may approximate these things, but it is not them identically. But sometimes it seems like people in the FNAF community mistake it for as if fiction were true. This is world building-- this is the cost of world building. How does this world operate, how do things happen, how does a text not contain plot holes. It does. It is written. It is so.

[^^ drawing of versions of the mimic from the futuristic and past tense timelines of FNAF ^^]

     Even though fiction doesn't exist but through the nodal points of those who create it and those who consume it, the flesh of fiction still doesn't gain form. The history of the author informs the fiction, informs the fictional world, but fiction is not reality. I'm losing the ability to speak again, so I hope I've said something in the realm of what I wanted to...

     To close out on, a note on the fictional worlds of Pokemon. My perception is that Pokemon narrates itself as if there is a kind of limitless potential to exist within its fictional worlds of play. How does this promise of fiction grapple with the material realities of the hardware that's used to play it (and the software that's used to run it)? Take Pokemon Emerald, for example, where the hardware and software place strict limits on the rng seeds the game can run on (in fact, in a vast majority of cases, it runs on the same one seed across all instances irregardless of player intervention). Such a limitation means that there are simply some pokemon (precise variations of certain pokemon, that is) that you cannot catch. In Pokemon Gold and Silver, the game's code means that shiny pokemon can never have max stats (because shininess is calculated by the same variable that determines genetic stats). The narrative the play space offers cannot produce certain fictions. If the player believes this fiction exists when it does not (when it cannot) what does that mean for history, for fiction, for reality? There's room plenty to expand this thinking to consider such things as hoaxes and superstitions too, but for me, my thinking has been caught on the fact that the physics of the world make it so that certain fictions are systematically harder to imagine.

I'm still falling, but I can feel my legs again. Right now.


     I will be cannibalizing another incomplete video essay script for this one as I've suddenly been thinking about it again. While I'm not that familiar with One Piece but watching Tirrb's latest video , on anime, and hearing his mention of Oda, reminded me of comments I've heard about the one piece fandom -- that fan's come up with these extensive readings and what not for the text pinning it all to a master narrative authored by Oda when maybe it wasn't intended. While One Piece and FNAF differ in important ways (for time's sake I'll say one major difference is how long each piece has been rattling around for), I feel that they probably have shared traits in their relationships to authorship. However, since I don't know that much about One Piece -- not enough to speak confidently about it -- I will talk about FNAF here.

     In essence, I feel like FNAF emblemizes a new relationship to authorship people and consumers of a work may have. I don't know the history of media and media technologies globally, but I feel it's reasonable enough to make this claim. ... What I mean is that it seems like most authorship discourses seem to revolve around a basis in literature,. Maybe a figure like Tolkien has a relationship to his readership where people are reading intention extensively into every nook and cranny of his texts, but I think that's different too. At least in the sense that, from what I understand Tolkein and LOTR are more separated than Scott Cawthon and FNAF. I often hear people talk about Scott Cawthon or FNAF as if each were the other simultaneously. This happens not only when people narrate the history of the games (e.g., Scott was down on his luck and released FNAF [the first one] as his one final hail mary before bowing out of the games industry) but also when people interpret and narrate the content of the games.

[^^ drawing of the classic Scott png, pictured here with his pal Bonnie ^^]

     FNAF has, in practice, been told over installments since the first game came out in 2014. While not as clearly demarcated as the installments of Bendy and the Ink Machine or Poppy Playtime that would come after it, FNAF's text / story, if there can be said to be one, nevertheless has an indelible relationship to installation storytelling. It's probably the case that FNAF (the first game) became an installment only after further games started to come out. I would be interested to see at what point the series and its author (because so many of these narrations work with the premise of that there is just one author) fully collapsed into one unit. I will turn to Game Theory as shorthand of what I mean (itself a worth being a case study for part and whole / authorship discourse). The first Game Theory video on FNAF, to my knowledge, doesn't mention Scott Cawthon that much, and instead uses the text as a site to orate some random true crime stuff and be vaguely anti-black. Jump forward to today, and it seems like it's all but guaranteed that a Game Theory video on FNAF will use Scott Cawthon as metonymic shorthand for disoursing the series and texts themselves. That is, the editors place a png of Scott on screen which the speaker then targets their questions or rage or other emotions at (whereby Scott is a presumed synecdoche for the writhing many limbs of FNAF). At some point between the first Game Theory video on FNAF and today, it evolved to be an effective and communicative shorthand to edit FNAF theory videos in this way.

     This evolution is important, I think. As authorship is very much temporally defined. I remember in the 2016-2018 era, I heard people talking about JK Rowling in regard to Roland Barthes' essay, "The Death of the Author." At that point, my perception is that the discourse sought to litigate how much Rowling's post hoc authorial interventions should be weighed into consideration when reading the text (what is loosely encapsulated in the Cursed Child or whatever that play is called). In some way or another, Harry Potter and Rowling as text and author have mutated since then. Easiest to narrate is that in the interim Rowling has become more and more vocal of an Anti-Trans (fascist) voice in the media, using her platform as author to push for violence against marginalized communities. Probably some people look past this or are otherwise not as affected by it. What I do know is that some non-zero portion of Harry Potter's readership have moved away from the texts due to Rowling's problematics. Two other changes in the text-author relation have been that Harry Potter as media mix has continued to expand since 2016 (when it already held an enriched spot in the marketplace) and that Rowling has become a more vocal figure as distended from being an author. While Rowling may use her authorship to grant her legitimacy, my perception is that her black mold stuff and what not isn't usually an act of Harry Potter authorship in any kind of explicit way.

     Part of what I find interesting about the collapse of text and author in FNAF's case is that Scott in theory can enter a similar position as to where Rowling stands today. While I won't say that it's only Rowling's hate speech that has led to shifts in audience perception of the text-author relationship, I feel like it would be hard to argue it hasn't played a part. Meanwhile, Scott is still proudly paraded as author of FNAF even when it becomes public knowledge that he proudly supports the American Republican party in explicit, monetary ways. (As with Rowling, the profit he makes from the text translates into oiling a machine of violence and hate). But except for the fuss that was raised when Scott's political contributions first came to light, this is mostly ignored these days. (is my perception). Even though Scott's politics are inarguably inextricable from the text, going back to his work at the Christian animation studio, Hope Animation (this is where the genius of engineering that is globglogabgalab originates) -- [Maybe if he made veggie tales I wouldn't be mentioning the christian animation thing] -- they (Scott's politics) get conveniently left out of the vast majority of FNAF community discourse.

[^^ drawing of the globglogabgalab, from an animated film scott worked on before making FNAF ^^]

     Continuing, Scott's authorial role supersedes his attempts even at his own (authorial) life. Despite the fact that Scott apparently stepped down from being the sole author of FNAF and handed the reins largely over to the studio Steel Wool to continue the series since Help Wanted-- despite this fact, Scott is still paraded out as, usually, the sole and genius author of FNAF. When FNAF sucks, it's actually explicitly stated (within the community) to be because Scott didn't author the text *enough.* Security Breach and Burntrap get paraded as the prime examples of this. As Scott narrates in his second Dawko interview, during the development cycle of the game, he had poor communication with the team at Steel Wool, which then led to miscommunication(s). According to Scott, as he intended it, Burntrap wasn't supposed to move at all, but he does in the released version(s) of the game. Hence, the failure of Security Breach becomes the success of Scott's authorship. While Scott still doesn't play an active role in Steel Wool's development process (in terms of making the game, that is), the team at Steel Wool have effectively relinquished any kind of explicit authorial role to Scott. The same goes for the books. The failures of the Frights or Pizzaplex short story collections is because Scott worked with co-authors, where he sent them an outline of the story and they then punched it up to short story length. When the books contain discrepancies, it's because Scott wasn't enough of an author. (This is putting aside that even Scott's self-authored texts contain discrepancies). In short, Scott Cawthon is currently viewed as such a singular author of FNAF that he alone is the arbiter of truth and goodness in anything that passes through the series. To qualify as officially being FNAF, a text must move through Scott Cawthon.

     Part of why I think this is odd is that authorship seems like it might be not the most perfect fit for describing video game production. With books, it's easy enough to imagine an author as a single individual. J.K. Rowling writes a draft, maybe an editor takes a look, but then more or less, (maybe also throw in some publishers) the version of Harry Potter that ends up on bookshelves around America can be traced back to things of her creative invention. Why video games don't match up to single person authorship, I'm not entirely sure. I don't think it's necessarily a quirk of the medium (e.g., it's probably not a: b/c books are a single person experience, so it’s easier to render this as a one-to-one communication). There are developers like Concerned Ape with Stardew Valley or Local Thunk with Balatro where the dev team is pretty much one person. I don't know in these cases how many people might be involved contributing other labor such as playtesting or other assets such as music or sprite work. I'm also not 100% in the know on what has gone into FNAF, but I do know some things. For example, while Scott certainly did the largest share of the leg work with FNAF (the first game), as early as FNAF World, he was already working in extensive collaboration with Leon Riskin who has continued to contribute music to the series. Another common collaborator is PinkyPills, an artist who he's worked with for a number of the FNAF shitpost games, resulting in... questionable visuals. Not as visibly influencing the games have been his two children who he's had help him playtest his games since I think at least FNAF 2. And then there's the voice actors. The most immediately evocative example I can think of is the voice actor for Balora-- she was apparently either asked or allowed to write the lyrics Balora sings in Sister Location. Because of this, people have BOTH read Balora's song as important textual element of FNAF and mined it for meaning (this is to help litigate that maybe the animatronic houses Afton's dead wife in some kind of way) AND dismissed the song as unimportant since Scott didn't author it himself.

[^^ drawing of william afton, in the style of the FNAF/VHS analog horror series ; not directly related to the essay, but also yes it is related ^^]

     I'm not sure where this leaves things, but I am curious to see how Scott's relation to the community and to FNAF evolves over the next couple of years. Because that's the thing, it's not just about the author and the text. There also has to be someone ascribing authorship to the author over the text. That someone can be the author, but I don't think that gets us very far. No, with FNAF, it's crucial that the community is involved in this process -- they give Scott the power over the series by believing that he has it. I wonder if Scott knows this-- if his efforts to monetarily support fan games have in anyway been efforts to maintain singular control of FNAF's authorship. What I've not been talking about that much is that I think there's likely some kind of greater utility in all of this -- both for the community in imagining that such a singular author as Scott exists and for Scott to allow this image to remain undisturbed. Certainly, such things as invisibilizing labor (as Capital loves to do -- something relevant as the FNAF empire continues to accrue capital) and internet streamlining technologies (the apparatuses through which FNAF communities currently organize, by which narrating authorship as singular is currently more efficient and thus more encouraged, by way of the technology's design) probably play a role, but I'm hesitant to say that they are the sole, main parts of this all. Something to think about. An author that doesn't die.

*What's also strange is how often Scott's position as author is used as an empty signifier for reading the text. Whereas in Film Studies, the field I studied in undergrad, someone might research the background of an actor or director and use that information to read into a text connected to such a figure (authored in some way by such a figure), I don't see this happen in any notable way in FNAF-related discourses. The closest things usually get is saying, Oh, well Scott is Christian, so X, Y, or Z (Character name, or vague theme) probably applies to the text or is suitable to be read into it. Like, I guess this logic holds up on its own, but it seems like it doesn't get very far -- just a simple syllogism: If [person] is Christian, then [person] uses Biblical name for character. Scott is Christian, therefore, Scott uses Biblical names for character.

I'm sitting right now in front of a bleeding limb, but I don't want to face it. So I'm writing this. Or starting to write this.

     Some things that motivated me to make this post: someone replied to a comment I left under a Poppy Playtime video the other day where I was saying maybe the game can be read as containing a political message or as interpretable via political frameworks. The reply said (in essence), yeah, well maybe this is just mascot horror doing the mascot horror trope of evil corporation is evil. This comment ate at me for a day. The second set of factors that motivated me to make this post is that there's been a trend in FNAF discourse over the past couple of years, of people complaining, or otherwise observing that FNAF "isn't scary anymore" (example 1, example 2... --I leave it there for now b/c i got bored of dredging through my watch history and bc i don't wanna put small channels on blast for no reason--) I've observed at a distance several fan initiatives trying to reimbue horror into fnaf by making different fan game remakes or spins on the classic series. In response to these arguments, I've seen others speculate that maybe the upcoming FNAF game(s), such as The Secret of the Mimic will be able to make FNAF scary again. While I don't remember if these arguments specifically site this as a reason why that could be, there's also a general sentiment that the FNAF VR titles (of which "The Secret of the Mimic" would be) are generally scarier than the PC games simply due to the technology involved. An anecdote speaking to this effect I believe comes from an interview by FuhNaff with Jason Topolski, the creative director at Steel Wool Studios (the studio in charge of making most FNAF games since FNAF: Help Wanted in 2019), where Jason says that when they were first developing Help Wanted and were trying to get Scott to sign off on the project, that they sent their dev version to him but he ended up being too scared to finish playtesting it once he saw what especially the Sister Location animatronics looked like in VR. Since then, Scott Aparently makes his kids playtest the VR games instead of him.

     So this is the general status quo coming into this post: mascot horror is an established genre with replicatable and identifiable tropes, some fans complain FNAF is not scary, and others say the VR games are too scary.

[^^ drawing of a couple of freddies ; not directly related to essay ^^]

     The first question I want to consider is, why is FNAF not scary anymore? Even putting aside the VR titles and just focusing on the PC versions of the games, as played on the PC, what differences of scariness can be charted throughout the series' history. To begin with, I'd say it's never been a given that FNAF is a scary game. I've always been afraid of the animatronics and I know others who've similarly developed a fear of animatronics (in general) because of the series and their exposure to it, but we aren't the only population who engaged with FNAF at the time. I remember tuning into a stream (or maybe it was a vod or an edited video..?) for a channel I watched at the time (choosing not to specify for various reasons), where the streamer was complaining about how lame and boring FNAF was. Specifically, he cited that the game had minimal gameplay options and was unrealistic. "If I were there [in the pizzeria as a nightguard], I'd just take my gun out and shoot them [the animatronics]" is the quote I have playing in my head -- most likely this is a paraphrase of what he actually said, but this is the sentiment that's stuck with me. The fact that the game didn't feature the ability to move around in 3d space, for this streamer, meant that he couldn't take it seriously and thus couldn't see himself getting scared by it. I remember feeling shame when I heard this because I was still scared even though I guess I wasn't supposed to be. But that's besides the point.

     Conversely, as for the loudest people I've heard saying FNAF used to be scary but isn't anymore, the main complaint I've heard is that FNAF was scary back in the old days when everything was limited and simple but now that you can move around in 3d, it's all fallen to shit and is a kiddy baby game. Considering this perspective, I wonder what some of the turning points would have been when FNAF stopped being scary. Was it just when Security Breach came out? Well, jumping back all the way to FNAF 3, people were already saying FNAF fell off and wasn't scary any more. Apparently, the 'FNAF isn't scary' complaints (specifically about the FNAF 3 Springtrap jumpscare where he goes :0 -- see also, this video) impacted Scott in some kind of way where he felt motivated to make FNAF 4 specifically (or in part, more likely) to prove to people that FNAF can still be scary -- or maybe better put, to take one more swing at what scary jumpscares are. And hey, I guess it worked. In my opinion, that game is pretty scary. Or, is it? It scares me, but I've never played FNAF and it takes hardly even anything to scare me with FNAF. But is it scary to everyone? Eh, probably. But to be nitpicky and biased, I'll draw attention to max moders who, as I've noted in previous essays, approach FNAF games as mathematical puzzles to be solved, where the aesthetics are almost circumstantial and the true treasure is the challenge of solving how the AI works and coming up with surefire routines to best the game every time. And they put their all into these efforts, to the extent that people have played FNAF4 without, for example, ever closing the room doors* (how you stop animatronics from getting in and jumpscaring you, ostensibly).

Long story short, my take away for this section is that I think any narrative of FNAF's fear fall off that offers a singular culprit can't be assessing the full truths of the situation. But that's just me.

*I link this video for reference, but I feel it's necessary to also link the accusations which have recently been brought against him and his managing of his community via Discord. To be "fair" "and" "Balanced" "TM" "C" "R", I will also link his response video

[^^ drawing of the mimic doing grimmick genderswap things ; not directly related to the essay ^^]

     Another question can be, what made FNAF scary in the first place? An easy metric to point to could be jump scares, as they have scare (as in scary) in the name. But as I mentioned with my account of fan reactions to FNAF 3, FNAF's jump scares have apparently only been definitely scary since FNAF 2. Staying on jump scares for a moment more, and taking the example of games like Freddy Fazbear Pizzeria Simulator and Ultimate Custom Night, I've continued to this day to hear fan complaints about how these games handled the medium -- instead of the animated jump scares that made FNAF, these games employ what's basically a glorified, gyrating .jpeg image. To be fair, I've heard some of these fans admit that they know there are technological limitations confining what jump scares are allowed to be in these games (e.g., UCN is such a big game [in terms of number of characters], that there wasn't enough room to both have complex, animated jump scares and have the game run well on the Click Team game engine).

     Outside of jump scares (as I don't actually here those cited as why FNAF is scary except when people say why Security Breach is NOT scary because it has bad jump scares), other factors I've heard people cite for why they think FNAF was scary (to them and in general) include the games' settings and atmospheres, their cryptic/concealed natures, and maybe some other reason that I'll remember later, or not. Common narratives of why FNAF (the first one) got so big was because it was a marked difference from other popular horror games at the time. Amnesia-likes (games where you can move around in 3D) were the norm and therefore people got used to them and weren't scared of them anymore. Into this climate comes FNAF which reels in player control (causing a sense of helplessness and loss of autonomy) and exists in an altogether different setting than the fantasy or wooded settings of prominent Amnesia-likes such as Amnesia: the Dark Descent or Slenderman. [*a side note before I forget, I've heard interesting claims made for why Amnesia the Dark Descent is uniquely scary which site it's 3D-ness but add that the ability to have your camera clip through things or glitch out opens room for a unique kind of existential and embodied dread --> okay i know there's a patricia taxxon tumblr post talking about this, but im not finding it right now...]

[^^ drawing resembling FNAF 4 night time gameplay, vaguely made to resemble the survival log book ^^]

     A question I think could be helpful for thinking through this whole thing is where does FNAF locate its fear / horror? Where, within the story world of FNAF are we told scariness resides? I think this is an interesting question in part because the games' worlds must diverge from the gameplay to some extent. Take FNAF 3, for example. We learn that this is a horror attraction within the game world -- Fazbear's Fright -- and the player character (be he Hudson or Michael Afton or whomever) is a security guard hired to oversee the facility for the week before it opens. I find a ton of stuff in the game scary -- even the geography of the establishment and how exposed everything is I find frightening. But the player character must not, at least to the extent that they come back to work here for a week straight. Because of how FNAF works, jump scares generally depict actions that *could* happen in the story, but which don't in the way that we see them. In the case of FNAF 3, the Springtrap jumpscare(s) cannot be something the player character experiences, because then they would just die and the game wouldn't go on for however many more days. Therefore, the player character must not find Springtrap that scary (Springtrap is not a resurrected killer seeking to hunt you down, but just part of the routine; clock in, play a few .mp3 files through speakers around the facility, then clock out). Now, to be fair, I haven't read the Fazbear Frights story that apparently clarifies what the lived experiences of the FNAF 3 nightguard were -- the one image I've seen from some capacity of a illustrated retelling of the story suggests the player character is pretty scared of Springtrap, but I feel like that's potentially at odds with what we see in the game.

     While Springtrap's jumpscare(s) may not be true to life, FNAF 3 is unique in that it has the phantom animatronics, which can jump scare you without ending your night. It seems like these would be experienced by the player character and thus would be read as scary (though they can technically all be avoided -- e.g., this video). This is the first time in the series that jump scares have not led to a game over. Prior to this, explicitly noted moments of fear are few and far between. The only one I can think of is when phone guy in FNAF 2 expresses fear in wondering "why on earth" the player character is still showing up to work after there's been a murder spree at the building.

     Zooming out now from case by case analyses of what's scary for players versus what's scary for security guards, it can be worth considering other sites of fear (outside of the security guards, that is) throughout the series. Post-Dittophobia discussions have gravitated towards FNAF 4 and Sister Location, looking at different ways it seems like Afton engaged with fear outside of the contexts of what's shown in player gameplay segments. Speculations on this front generally fall within the range of Afton experiments on his kid(s) or kidnapped children using some form of hallucination inducing mechanism. The two main candidates usually put forward are sound illusion disks and fear gas. I think these are interesting for a couple reasons. While horror media reflecting on the phenomena of horror (and charging it with a lot of weight and power) is not new, it's still worth it to keep in mind that this is also what's going on here. FNAF's genre informs what actions its characters can and do take. William Afton experiments with fear because the games are scary, and thus fear is framed as a desirable commodity -- something that all of *this* is somehow working towards. This set up could be a reason for why FNAF games perceived as less scary are written off. If FNAF isn't scary, then what's the point? The experiment would be a failure (in this sort of framework).

[^^ drawing of the dittophobia experiments (was the intention) ^^]

     Moving on from this, but keeping with illusion disks and fear gas, we can observe who the subjects of fear are -- children in this case, as compared to adult security guards. While it's arguable what age we're playing as in FNAF 4 during the night segments, every other time that the player character has been definitively a child has coincided with non-scary gameplay/story segments. (Maybe Fruity Maze in FFPS contests this, but I think the fear there is something imposed by the player and not perceived by Suzie in the diegesis). But anyways, through Afton, it's that FNAF says children are the people who get scared in this world. Probably their parents get scared too (and maybe the books speak to this effect), but to my knowledge this is not narrated and anyways the fear experiments are specifically targeted at children. So one answer for why FNAF isn't scary anymore could be that people aren't children anymore -- they've lost access to being a part of the prime demographic of who FNAF is about/made for. That Scott has always had his two young kids playtest his games speaks to the child-centeredness of FNAF as well. Under this logic, FNAF that is scary again must innovate in some and step outside of the boundaries established by the series so as to circumvent the foreclosure of childhood as endpoint of fear. ~ooooooo,,, spoooky taxesss~

     One more thing and then I feel like I had some other point to get to about where FNAF locates its horror -- it's also interesting that fear generation as with fear gas and illusion disks relies on distorting the world in some way. FNAF (the first game)'s aesthetics may reinforce this, such as with the hall posters that can mysteriously change text, or the animatronics which can glitch out on the cameras, or even the whole It's Me situation of images flashed on screen for only a few frames. While these hallucinatory elements exist at the same level as the normal gameplay (and thus it's arguable whether they should even be demarcated in this way), I believe the intention is nonetheless to demonstrate that psychological interventions cause fear (here for the player, in FNAF 3, though, this extends to be the same for the player character). An issue in figuring out where the player ends and the player character ends is that the game screen is adapted to appear on a monitor in the real world, and thus must be some kind of interpolation of the first person vision it's approximating. I think waving away the stylistic strangeness of such things as pulling up the monitor occluding the entire frame in most games (so the implication is that the player character just has their face planted all the way against their camera setup?) makes sense and should be kept at hand so as not to fixate on the dichotomies of real and symbolic that sometimes bog down discoursing the series. That said, I'm hesitant to wave them fully away. I mean, look again at the jump scares, where these are player experiences that the player character cannot have experienced in the same way and to the same capacity (e.g., you can die multiple times on the same night). But where does that lie and what does settling that do, I don't know yet

[^^ drawing of the floating golden freddy head in an approximation of the fnaf 2 hallway; not directly related to the essay ^^]

     I guess I'll close this breakout section with this: in FNAF fear is real and quantifiable and written into the history books. Subjects experience fear as a response to events. In Dittophobia, the fear gas makes Rory scared. This is real and it happens, and we can point to it. However, I think one of the crises affecting people wondering where the fear went when they reflect on FNAF games and their lives, is that life and the act of living are, fundamentally, anti-historical and anti-narrational in some capacity. Fear in FNAF is fixed and solvable. Fear in the life I live changes every day. Through exposure therapy, certain fears can be overcome. Some people still find FNAF scary (me) some people find it trite and played out. Different spectators feel all kinds of different ways. But Rory -- he's the only person in that room, and the fear gas causes a repeating and quantifiable reaction. Fear in FNAF is neurological function, it is physical in the way tears are, it is a bodily fluid (this is what all the evil scientists in FNAF are chasing after; remnant, or agony; Taggart or Afton), it is an effect of life and trauma and pain and the nerves reacting to stimuli in a certain way. This is probably true of life outside of FNAF too, in some ways. Jump scares are a kind of primordial, bodily scare -- there's something like a formula that can be performed repeatedly and which can be evaluated to separate good jump scares from bad ones. But the fact that there are bad jump scares, the fact that some people thought FNAF 3 jump scares weren't scary or that UCN jump scares were even laughable-- I think this indicates that even in physical-seeming fears of the world I live in, they vary, case by case, person by person. And, to transition into where I'm going next, these fears in the world I live in are socially informed. Exposure therapy is another way of saying there's a genealogy to the thing. The circumstances of the world and society one lives in inform the ways they can experience fear and the sites they can play it off of.

[^^ drawing of pigpatch and his banjo, more or less ; not directly related to the essay ^^]

     I know these posts keep being long, but really not meaning to draw things out. So as to honor this, hopefully this section will be the last and will close things out somewhat succinctly.

     If horror is contextual, and the horror of FNAF (the first game) was informed by it's divergence from the horror of it's contemporaries, then the emergence of Mascot Horror as a subgenre indicates a different climate of horror (that then also affects the horror). One comparison, for example, could be that older horror games have often emphasized medical or asylum spaces (see Silent Hill or Outlast, for example), whereas this current era of Mascot Horror takes up settings of dejected corporate spaces. While the sanist anxieties manifested in Silent Hill-type games have been speculated on for some time (e.g., there can be political utility in othering disabled and/or insane populations -- though this too comes from a complex set of interlocking mechanisms), I both don't know nor have I seen others talk about what it is this newer era of Mascot horror games are commenting on in taking up the corporate settings that they do.

     One reading could be along the lines of Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead from 2006, where the threat of zombies is linked with the consumerist context of the film's setting in a mall. Maybe the Pizzaplex of Security Breach would qualify to this end, but I don't think of Chuck E Cheese, for example (what FNAF [the first one] is playing off of with its setting) is the epitome of consumerist culture. But I think that there are things that get reflected. I can't quite put my finger on them, but I'm sure they're there. I've offered other speculations in previous writing I've done on Mascot Horror, but I'll summarize here. Some other options include scariness to reflect scariness of capitalist contexts of the games (the scariness of being a laborer under capital, working for an enterprise that wants you dead) or the scariness of the family unit (the scariness of being locked in your home with your abuser). FNAF continues to evolve and now stretches at once backwards and forwards in time. With these changing circumstances, it's no doubt that what FNAF finds scary will change as well -- that what FNAF demonstrates is scary about our world will change as well.

     So, no. I wouldn't say that it's an innocent gesture if the reveal in Poppy Playtime is that the CEO became a monster (or was one all along) even though he seemed so nice to everyone. Even if evil corporations are a trope in Mascot Horror, this trope and this genre came from somewhere and, at least at one point in time (though I argue still to this day), reflected the impulse of (an) author[s] living in society. We inherit the traumas of our prior generations. We can try to learn to heal. But I think it can be naive to say that they (the traumas) are not even there.

YouTube short I had vaguely in the back of my head while writing. Not sure if I mentioned it in the piece -- I'm too woozy right now to check to confirm

   I want to begin with a note about audiences. I spend a lot of time thinking about things. Often I'm thinking about things while doing things -- e.g., watching a YouTube video, playing a game, listening to music etc. Frequently my thoughts relate to the thing i'm engaging with. . One potential hurdle to sharing my thoughts, is that the demographic or community im thinking about-- there's no guarantee they would hear the what I have to say about what I've been thinking about. . So far, between 2024 and 2025, I've put out three fnaf videos. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I said in those., but my sense is is that the communities im talking about probably wouldnt / didn't see my video. Put another way, the audience for my video would be more so composed of people , for example, who are my friends irl. Some of my friends are into fnaf, but the majority are not. In this post I want to work through some of my thoughts about categorizations of what constitutes my favorite minecrafter or who I consider to be the best minecrafter / minecraft youtuber. hitherto, i've seen at least a handful of videos taking up this point of discussion slash consideration (litigating who's the best Minecrafter). I see people debate about it or talk about people debating about it often enough for it to be a perceived (by me) trend. Generally, I've had a hard time engaging with communities online that I don't know already in person. I have pretty extreme social anxiety and putting myself out there into spaces I perceive as unknown-- that's generally been a step too far for me. An effect of this is that the people and spaces I engage with (parasocially, I suppose)-- my thoughts on these matters stay mostly with myself, even if ostensibly I try to articulate or share them. I spend a lot of time thinking about things and I like sharing my thoughts with people if I can. With all of this being said, I'll try to henceforth navigate the fact that my majority audience is unfamiliar with what i'm talking about (most of the time).

[^^ drawing of etho get surprised by creeper ^^]

     I think that's most of what I wanted to say in the preface. Anyways, this post comes as an offshoot of a video essay script I'm working on right now, which has the current working title of "being trans and divining GOD'S TRUE NAME." I presently envision this video to be a colage or kaleidoscope of thoughts on matters about truth using a bunch of different micro-scale case studies to hopefully end up saying something, via induction or whatever it takes. In one of the sections I have sketched out, I talk about a minecraft video essay about who's the best minecraft player. . Although I cite that specific video, my interest in bringing it up in the script is more related to thoughts circulating through the comment I left underneath it -- the video was a nice shorthand for some of the ideas that crystallized for me while watching it (but which I had been working through for some time prior). Anyways, in this post, I want to consider what I feel goes into someone or something being the best (with respect to a field and an orator declaring that statement). In this case, I will be saying I think EthosLab is the best Minecrafter / Minecraft YouTuber.

[^^ drawing of etho waving to camera in front of smelting array ^^]

     On its own, this declaration doesn't convey a lot of information.

     In this post I want to try and deconstruct what I mean when I say Etho is the best minecrafter and what I imagine other people say when they make similar claims. I want to start by tracing some of the frameworks for litigation Frostbyte Freeman offers in his videos on the matter (the video essay I talk about in my video is the second in his series discussing the matter). As for the field of Minecraft -- who's the best Minecrafter? -- Freeman works through several categories that he and others have proposed for to chart people across so as to gauge who's the best. This type of framework is an objective-esque methodology. Freeman says common categories people use for evaluation are such things as building skills, pvp, and redstone. Freeman proposes to add the category of "impact" as he feels the previous categories otherwise fail to screen for the likes of such figures as BdoubleO100 aka bdubs. While Freeman starts his series outlining an objective methodology, he reveals early on that he's not actually that interested in going through the process of litigating fully what it would mean to evaluate every single potential candidate along these criteria. Instead, both of his videos on the matter evolve to offer modified frameworks for how someone could consider someone else to be the best Minecrafter. I appreciate the complications Freeman brings to the initial objective categorizations. Pvp, for example, is generally evaluated as whichever player can kill the other player in pvp, that's the better player. The best pvper is thus whoever has the best mechanics, game knowledge, and ability to execute upon all of that (to be clear, these ableist criteria). Taking bdubs as an example, though, Freeman pushes back against this as the sole legitimate mode of evaluating pvp goodness. Even though bdubs mechanically sucks at pvp, Freeman views him as nevertheless a talented player in the category of pvp. In his very being bad at pvp, Freeman says that bdubs ends up accentuating the soft peculiarities that hum underneath Minecraft's various gameplay systems. When you watch bdubs pvp, every creeper and zombie becomes reimbued with threat -- the game remains a revolving cavalcade of danger and excitement. Bdubs defies the framework of mastery and relishes in timid and independent mediocrity (according to Freeman). In other words, bdubs is a pvp master because he takes what could possibly be perceived as shortcomings and time and again reconstitutes them into points to take in stride and flourish with. I appreciate this gesture greatly.

[^^ drawing of etho, yippee!! ^^]

     As much as I appreciate the insights Freeman brings to the conversation, I think he probably doesn't go far enough. To say another way: I think there's still a number of important and relevant criteria that contribute indelibly to one's choice of best minecrafter (whether they know it or not) which have yet to be mentioned in terms I've heard. I believe, and narrate to myself, that Etho is the best Minecrafter. Let me trace some things that might have happened to let me say this. I mean something specific when I say Etho is the best. Specific here does not mean one-dimensional. I sense what I mean is complex, but anchored. But what led up to this? What happened in history that let the world be like this today? (and tomorrow and yesterday?)

[^^ my drawing of dogboy etho and a sandy city llama ^^]

     Well, to jump to the quick of it, one thing I don't see discussed that often in 'who's the best Minecrafter' debates is the matter of privilege. For rekrap aka Parker to be able to spend a month building tunnels every day on the Lifesteal SMP (or for him to be on this type of SMP), for Mud Flaps to be able to spend 30 days of in real time catching tropical fish, or, most recently, for Etho to be able to spend a week building tunnels and collection systems between a dozen different trial chambers hundreds to thousands of blocks away from each other-- well, not everyone can do this. That's not a statement of physical or mental or ... ability, but of unequal access to time. If the criterion for best Minecrafter is simply that some [X person] can afford to spend [y amount of time] doing [z thing], then that's inherently classist / restrictive. By and large, most big Minecraft YouTubers are white guys with decent enough class access. (There are big non-white ∨ [logical Or operator] non-male creators too, don't get me wrong, but they are in the vast minority). While these white guys with big, successful channels-- while I'm not trying to say that they aren't skilled or that skill doesn't exist, I think it would nevertheless be rash to write out something like (class) privilege as something that informs who the greatest Minecrafter / Minecraft YouTuber is. There's no way to invent an objective categorization of skill that isn't impacted by the way Minecraft content creation has since its inception been tied to race and class and privilege. I feel like it's still fine to declare whoever you think is the best, but it might be helpful to do so while also acknowledging the circumstances that led them to where they are and that led you to where you are. For a while now, Minecraft YouTube content has been a line of work for many people. I've been watching Etho for close to a decade, if not more. For someone to be spending that much time on Minecraft and Minecraft content so continuously over so many weeks and months and years-- not everyone can do that. And yet I still think he's the best. Certainly, I place him higher than what I would colloquially categorize as clickbait content creators (I won't list any times because I sense the taxonomy would break down upon any kind of inspection). And I'm thankful that Etho has been privileged in this journey. In the sense that since he's been at it so long, he's more or less secured himself a niche (a privileged position) and thus he has much more lee way and affordance to experiment with content and form and many other things. I find his output incredibly inventive and inspiring and so many other things.

     But of course, his privilege is not invisible and sometimes I find myself having to look away so I don't have to confront the full reality of what led things to be the way that they are. I think the stereotype of Minecraft YouTubers being creeps or weirdos or otherwise getting canceled-- I think there's probably something to that. While Etho hasn't yet been publicly, loudly canceled, he still says and does things now and again that I cringe at. The biggest most recent example is in the QOTD segment from one of his Lets Play episodes from a couple months ago, Episode 588 where he talks in this video about how (paraphrasing), "oh, i'm sorry guys, i've been dealing with my family's property for a little bit recently, so I haven't had time to post or play much minecraft -- I had to deal with a homeless encampment that got set up on our grounds, and those guys were just nasty, but thankfully we called the cops, and we got them off our territory." I don't think it's super productive to list out everything problematic he or others have done, but it's important to keep them in mind. I can't personally hold Etho accountable in any kind of way, and I doubt there's much I can do to change his POV so I keep my thoughts to myself in this regard, making mental notes every now and again. Because the fact is that Etho and his videos hold an important place in my life. While surely I could find self-soothing in other places, I've developed a kind of parasocial relationship with him where watching his stuff and seeing him cameo in other people's videos fulfills an intense regulatory / soothing function for me. I find Etho (his body of work and his persona) a certainty not dissimilar to steel. That's what I write into it and that's what I need to get out of it. It's a survival mechanism. If things get dire and he does something I truly can't forgive him for, that would be painful in many ways. Painful because I've grown around him and integrated him (again, parasocially) into the rhythms of vitality that I require to maintain a functioning human body.

     The YouTuber lotodots recently made a video talking about his experience growing up watching Minecraft FNAF roleplay videos. Even though they were slop content and follow little logic, he describes how they fulfilled a vital role in anchoring his life, offering a certainty to come home to when he gets back from the stresses and compressions of school. Sometimes, for the viewer, quality is less important than impact (though impact is surely derived from quality in some kind of way). This is not, I don't think impact in the sense that Frostbite Freeman offers the term, but I think it's an important iteration to consider. When someone says someone else is the best Minecrafter, the orator is a person, and thus it's impossible for their personhood to not inform their statement. I say Etho is the best not because he's shaped content creation in any kind of way, or because TommyInnit fangirled over him when they were in an MCC together, but because of the impact he's had and continues to have on me. Of all the minecrafters out there, he's the best to do that.


     Etho is my little guy, also. I don't interact with fandom that much -- ive sometimes scrolled through Etho fan blogs on tumblr or interacted with fan edits on youtube... but my sense is that I have a kind of Fandom relation with Etho. he's my little guy. so silly. just doin his own thing (in a world where he has the privilege to do so).

[^^ drawing of etho as doggie yippee guy ^^]

   Note: I initially drafted this in my dreams last night, but when I first woke up, I was too eepy to write it down and thus ended up falling asleep again. I think I still remember broad enough strokes, so I'll do my best to capture what my dreaming self came up with.

     I've been thinking about this in a broad / general sense for a little bit now. Yesterday I watched a theory video about the new Poppy Playtime chapter speculating that perhaps the evil company's former CEO (Elliot Ludwig) will be revealed to be the big bad, aka the Prototype. The YouTuber says that some people don't think this would be the case because the CEO is canonically such a kind and nice guy (even though after he disappeared authorities found a dead boy on his property?). The YouTuber goes down a path of saying, well, but maybe narratively or whatever, he's had a change of character (for some reasons and hypotheses she moves through). I'm not really interested in that route of litigation. What strikes me more is that this seems like an easy calculus. A character is a CEO? They're evil, in some kind of way. That level of capital accumulation necessarily requires wide scale exploitation. That the company Elliot Ludwig ran was cartoonishly evil, like genuinely doing Nazi shit on kidnapped orphan children matters, in a sense, but, at least in my preferred version of the world, this would be for to magnify the innate evilness of the system Playtime Co. emerged from and is sustained within. In other words, I'm not sure why it's apparently a radical position to say that CEOs are not nice people and that the CEO of a child killing factory is probably an even more not nice person. Like why is the pro-CEO propaganda being entered into consideration? I'm not sure I follow the logic on that. That this discussion is happening (the trial of Elliot Ludwig) and the relations of capital are being ignored, especially the relations of the workers to the company are being ignored, I feel like this indicates a supreme failure of what I assumed was anti-capitalist storytelling on part of Mob Entertainment (that is, the whole of Poppy Playtime).

[^^ my drawing of what it might look like for a security guard to run into the animatronics roaming the halls ^^]

     I start with this example, but I want to work through these ideas more fully using the case of FNAF as that's what I'm more familiar with, and in any case there's more flesh to dig through there. So FNAF too is ostensibly a series about how evil and crooked the Fazbear Corporation is (or Fazbear LTD or whatever it's incorporated as). And yet, I don't remember ever hearing people use political theory as grounds for considering the series. Most people I see approaching the subject even (of a critical analysis of the fictional Fazbear Entertainment Corporation) do so in the regular FNAF hermeneutic fashion of only working with the tools the series gives you for evaluation. That is, the relation of the company to its workers is considered, for example, via the sticky notes and worker logs hidden around the Pizzaplex in Security Breach. The general consensus is that the company, shortly before the game takes place, did a mass execution of all its employees and replaced them with automated labor in the security bots (jury is out on if the workers got literally transformed, if their consciousnesses got transferred, or if it's more of a metaphorical replacement). That's fine, I guess, but I feel like that's stopping pretty short of what seems to be some pretty obvious critiques we can be making of Fazbear Entertainment and, more relevantly, of applying those critiques to the world we all live in together. Sure, FNAF exists in a fiction world, and one that is more and more being severed from our own via its ever expanding world building, but the images and systems that perforate FNAF are not wholly invented -- we have most of them here too, so I'm not sure why there not more of an effort by the Fandom to take those into consideration. I say this, but, in certain spaces, something vaguely approximating this has popped up from time to time -- YouTuber Candi Buunny recently released a video investigating what the video games have to say about justice and how that may reflect on systems of incarceration and punishment in the real world.

     With all this prelude out of the way, what I want to consider is if FNAF is effective anti-capitalist media. For a long time I've assumed it must be because of how cartoonishly evil and transparent the repeating atrocities of the parent company, Fazbear Entertainment, are and continue to be, but that these haven't translated into much introspection or action that I've seen makes me wonder to what extent these images actually interrogate capital. What they would be doing that's not interrogating capital, I don't have a solid grasp on, but options could include using anti-capitalist pastiche to trojan horse the development of a concerted franchise (the FNAF series) or something like to neuter what anti-capitalist action looks like and can be -- relevant perhaps in the sense that this is a series with a majority younger demographic; the theory here would be kids grow up consuming images of Fazbear = evil and not images speaking to the tangible violences of the real world. This last point, though, I wonder if this is a conservative, think of the children's critique, and I'll get into more caveats in a bit.

     In the meantime, join me in considering how FNAF might be falling short of capitalist critique. Staying on the mass execution of Pizzaplex's human labor in Security Breach, for example, I guess it's interesting how consistently the series has invisibilized labor and has never even remotely demonstrated laborers as powerful in their own right. For all the violences in FNAF, it's disproportionately laborers who bear the brunt of the suffering. Even though child deaths and murders started the series (timeline wise), with the likes of BiteVictim dying to Fredbear and at least Charlotte Emily and the children involved in the missing children's incident dying to William Afton, it's employees who start feeling the pinch once the engine of Fazbear, in all it's haunted metallic glory, gets running. Take, for example, the famous "Bite of '87" where an employee got literally lobotomized by an animatronic, potentially even while returning home from work (see this video by Alena's Woodlands for more on that). See also the literal player character, as early as the original Five Nights at Freddy's, where it's been all but a given that people working the night time security position-- that they frequently get killed on the job in often brutal manners, such as be mutilated against the certainty of endoskeleton steel. Then in the Steel Wool era, you have such things as the entire Help Wanted game series (which is literally just employee murder simulator) where you play the day in the life of a Fazbear employee forced into all manner of violent and dangerous situations. Even assuming that the player character wins every mini game (and thus never gets killed jumpscared by any of the animatronics), there's still a veritable treasure trove of lore pretty much exclusively dedicated to explicating all the gruesome ways employees have been used as fuel by both Fazbear Entertainment the parent company and the Mimic-aligned evil entities operating within (e.g., Jeremy from Help Wanted, Tape Girl from Help Wanted, Vanessa from ??? or Player Character [possibly he's still Jeremy] from Help Wanted 2). Employees get slaughtered, yes, but the game never speaks to their ability to possess power in and of themselves. Employees are almost always victims. Even when an employee resists against Fazbear Entertainment or the Mimic, such as the Player Character in Help Wanted 2 seems to be doing at various points, the emphasis there on singularity only magnifies the failure of the series to render the power of laborers. Laborers possess power not because one or two are uniquely talented and can go behind the backs of the execs to play video games at work, but because their labor is the means by which capital accumulates (or even exists in the first place). Laborers have the power to withhold their labor, for example, and can take such actions as go on strike or rally for legislation etc.. Scabs notwithstanding, the Pizzaplex cannot operate (prior to the employee executions) without laborers. Even though these capitalist entities require labor, the series is repeatedly coy about this and takes as a given that laborers will be available to be sacrificed. Corporate expansion is simply inevitable and, in fact, almost happens of its will.

     In a similar way, to work off a video essay script I have drafted but which I likely won't return to, the series is all about how evil and exploitative Fazbear Corporation is, despite its happy go lucky appearance -- how they abuse their workers and turn around and sell these smiling, singing faces (that have rotting, murders kids inside of them) -- and yet, extra-diegetically, FNAF is a merch selling juggernaut. The YouTuber lotodots has an interesting video going over FNAF merch that exists both in the games and real life. This is a strange thing, I think. And yet part of me feels like maybe this is just the consumerist iteration of loving the villain (hello to all the Springtrap lovers, you do you) -- which would be to say that it's something of a conservative critique to say "why you play game that says consumerism bad and yet you consume? checkmate dummy!" I also want to somehow tread the line that FNAF is not unique in its appeal to consumerism -- this is the thing to do these days. It's convenient, in a sense, that FNAF can advertise its merch within its games and just have that be a natural thing as part of its storytelling repertoire, but so what? Honestly, I don't know, so I'll pretend these complications don't exist for the meantime.

     Ignoring counterarguments, the reason I bring up FNAF merch and consumerist culture is that this merch also isn't self-generating. When I was more actively working on this video essay script I'm now interpolating, I tried to track down where some of the manufacturers are that make FNAF figurines, for example, but with what digging I was able to do, all parties were conveniently vague and coy about where they source the labor and the raw materials. However, based on what little information Funko did say, I can say with 80% certainty, that these tchotchkes are being made in exploitative conditions (as is the case for so much these days; [sarcastic] thanks fast fashion [/sarcastic]). I'm writing this on a different computer than that had my original research on it, so I can't pull up the figures right now, but know that in a majority of these vinyl and toy manufacturing facilities in the part of China where Funko says they source their labor, workers are working for the smallest of small pay, in conditions that lack proper temperature regulation and with hours that barely leave time for eating and sleeping, much less living anything of a life outside of the factory. And then I feel I should mention that once these things are manufactured there's the persisting ecological impact they have in that these Funko vinyl figures can't be disposed of in any kind of way, that is, vinyl is made from a non-recyclable plastic that also doesn't biodegrade almost at all. So you just have thousands of Freddies littering landfills around the world. I think this ecological argument probably has holes in it, so know that it's not the main thrust of what I'm trying to say, I just felt it was still worth mentioning. But anyways, the point remains that FNAF claims to critique Fazbear Entertainment and yet in all but the name itself (because sadly Scott Cawthon doesn't have access to magical reanimating soul juice) Scott Cawthon and the various limbs of industry involved in manufacturing FNAF content turn around and replicate the very injustices the apparently wicked Fazbear Entertainment was on blast for doing in the first place.

[^^ my drawing showing what the staff bot employee cull is doing, in effect ^^]

     I think I've said most of what I was planning to say in criticism of FNAF and its shoddy critique of capitalism. Undeniably, I've left holes, but my vague sense is that there's enough of a contour suggested in the above paragraphs to give the sense of what I mean to talk about. I'll close out by contesting my lines of logic. An easy and probably impotent contestation would be to say that FNAF (and mascot horror) is not unique in this regard -- that I go through all this chit chat about FNAF when it's just one head of this complex web of children's media sockpuppeting shoddy systemic criticism. I guess this is true, but in that case, that's just a sign that more work needs to be done, no? Another critique of my argument could be, does FNAF need to criticize capitalism? Does media need to be didactic? I'm not sure. I feel like it would be nice if FNAF followed through on what I perceive to be a promise it makes, that is, to criticize capital, but then again maybe FNAF doesn't actually make such a promise and this is me projecting onto it. I'm blanking on other caveats, so I'll turn to what I planned to be the closing remark: actually, FNAF does critique capitalism, just look at [X,Y,Z things I overlooked]. If something like this exists -- and it very well could, FNAF has had over a decade to mutter all manner of things -- then, yeah, I guess I concede some part of my argument. In fact, I would prefer for this to be the case. I want these mascot horror games to be doing things and saying things and being art that works toward beauty and criticism. So if it turns out that FNAF had the secret sauce all along, then I'm happy for that to happen. Maybe FNAF has never been genuinely interested in critiquing capital, and that's my loss for rambling for so long if that's the case. But if FNAF has wanted to do that at some point or another, and then followed through on that promise, I would be elated.


   I just don't want it to be a Frederick Jameson thing -- where these mascot horror games with dubious practices (such as Scott spending hundreds of thousands to sue people selling knock off fnaf merch or Mob entertainment gatekeeping lore information behind expensive NFTs) use the front of criticizing a caricature of capitalism, only to run around and reinforce it while we're all looking the other way. I don't want it to be, "well as long as you're a good CEO and less evil than Fazbear Entertainment, then, in my book, you're in the clear! :D". That would sting.

     This week has been all over the place for me. It has been filled with many icarus crash out moments. As of right now, the future is still quite uncertain for me. Perhaps my choice words will blow up in my face, perhaps not

     I don’t want to spend too much energy worrying about that right now. I'll deal with it how I can over the weekend and pick up wherever Sunday leaves me.

     In the meantime, I want to write at whatever length this ends up being about the game I've been playing to get me through the days this week. When I have this sort of crash out, I ve generally called it "falling in a hole" and that would extend to this week as well. In the past, I've played clicker games, Minecraft games, Dead by Daylight, Stardew Valley, and Cassette Beasts among others. I've been stalled out in terms of games for a little bit now. Since Balatro last summer, I haven't been able to play anything for an extended period of time. I think this is a side effect of an extended burn out just now catching up to me but that's besides the point. Anyways, this week I played Cloud Meadow – i.e., porn Stardew Valley with furries. I’ve played this game before -- in fact I originally bought it a couple of years ago when it first came out, but I haven't touched it much since my first 7 or 8 hours in it. I don't know how well known this game is, but I'll go off the assumption that it hasn't increased in popularity since I initially bought it, which is to say that it's not very well known.



     I put in around 22 hours into the game this week, so I want to go over some thoughts I had about it. I think they could be worth hearing out as I’m wont to make comparisons to Stardew Valley. I'm not sure where to begin my ramblings as I've had many thoughts and undoubtedly I'll miss some of them.



     To begin with, I suppose, I'll speak to the porn elements. I consider myself asexual and thus am not really that interested in sex. Paradoxically, I've developed a special interest in porn games over the past several years. I have a larger project I'm scaffolding which I hope to realize into something one day which will be cobbling together observations and posts I've been collecting from various porn game forums, noting trends in games and discourse. I can't speak entirely to the pornographic elements of this game, but I've appreciated the pixel art style since it initially came out. it's a bit of a bummer that the in depth sex animations haven't increased that much since launch, with the animated sprite art versions being what seems to be the standard for the past several years. I like how the creatures are drawn, so the high def animations I always enjoyed looking at. like most games, I skipped most of the dialogue with rare exceptions, so I can't speak to how well written or not the smut is

[^^ one of the loading screens when playing as the girl player character ^^]

     The game is kind of strange with regard to its sexual content. At some points it seems like it wants to be a full sex game with the silly fantasies that come embroiled within that -- i.e., random npc characters jumping to ask for sex or all the dialogue and diegesis being sex oriented. At others, though the game will be fairly sex-absent and there's not clear demarcations when the game is in sex mode or not. This means that sometimes there's a: surprise! you're having sex now (to me, who didn't read the dialogue -- I skip the sex scene anyways, so I guess it doesn't matter) while others there's: sex? what's sex? I just wanna sell you farm equipment and be obstinate over seed prices :3. I think a lot of porn games struggle with this balance, so it's not necessarily remarkable in Cloud Meadow's case, but, irregardless, I think this phenomenon is worth further consideration in the future.

     The development cycle has been very sporadic and I'd say, arguably, unreadable. What this has to do with sex is that in most content updates it seems like they add some kind of sex scene to the game. but the npc they add to have it with (it's almost always a new character, despite the fact that there are many existing characters I feel get underutilized for how neat their sprites are) is usually in a specific and hard to reach area such that if you aren't reading the patch notes when new updates come out (say if you come back to playing after several years like I have) then 50% of the sex scenes are essentially non-existent. I have no idea who these people are or how anyone is supposed to bone them. Returning to the subject of the high def sex scenes, the obvious standouts are the sex scenes between the player character and the,,, monster farm animals? idk how to explain it. its not bestiality, this is a furry game after all. but the main farming gameplay loop is that you're managing this farm -- you have some number of plots you can plant things in and fertilize with whatever to try to make money and improve quality of the seeds/produce,, this gets used most tangibly in recipes you can experimentally learn or in feeding your people.

     Who are your people? well this is the other side of the game. In a Monster Musume sort of style, it's that you're managing your farm with monster labor -- dragons, centaurs, harpies, etc.. You can get more monsters by hiring more or by hatching more from eggs. You can get eggs from the dungeon exploration sections (from interactable pickups or as loot drops), from the market on certain days, or from monsters breeding and laying the eggs. The game structure incentivizes this latter portion for to manage your farm. in a manner similar to pokemon breeding (but with more inheritable and mutable traits) it's a balancing act of breeding your monsters with each other or with the player character to hatch new eggs to potentially replace previous monsters and repeat the cycle. thankfully, im told, there's an incest prevention system that prevents you from breeding monsters that are too genetically connected. The monsters breeding with each other are animated with sprites and the interactions with the player are hi-def animations. These haven’t changed since the game launched and are one of the best parts of it, imo. Additionally, compared to the arcane and who knows where secret npc sprite sex scenes, most monster scenes are accessible pretty much from the beginning (or at least the first couple of hours). I’ll leave the sex talk here for now, but I’ll get back to it a bit at the very end.

[^^ one of the loading screens when playing as the boy player character ^^]

     I think it next makes sense to talk about this game in comparison to Stardew Valley. I guess both have dating sim elements? I suck at dating sims because I'm not interested in that sort of thing, so I just skip all the dialogue and have no clue what's going on or what to do. That is to say, I never did that part of Stardew Valley and I didnt engage with it here, so I guess effectively they're the same in that regard. The other main aspects of Cloud Meadow are the farming, the sex scenes, and the dungeon/pvp combat section / the story. obviously Stardew Valley isn't sex centered, so I wont talk about that here.

     As for the farming, I think for the most part Stardew does a better job handling those systems than this game. Stardew's grid system works well for its scale of automation and incremental improvement of the farming gameplay loop. I like a little Stardew farming at the start of the game, but once it gets to fall or winter, I pretty much fall off and am not interested in it any more. part of it I guess is it feels too much like the actual repetitive labor of working in the real world which I dont like and so continuing to do that when I get home isn't a big sell for me. I can't put my finger on it more than that. I appreciate how many little quirks the farming has, like that there's different events that can randomly happen and affect your crops in a certain way. The automation is nice enough -- the sprinkler, for example. the animal husbandry, though, i've never been able to get into. and the automation, to be clear, is more of a pleasantry and doesn't go far enough, in my opinion. I can't explain what I mean by this that much. I've never played to the point of end game sprinklers. but I guess what I mean to drive at is the constant micromanaging of all these different things that farming sims require, it overloads my executive functioning and every (in-game) day i'm running around trying to remember a million things I need to take care of or deal with in the future and simultaneously forgetting a million things I need to deal with or take care of in the present. this experience of sisyphean or tantalus-esque or whatever, this tartarus punishment of a gameplay experience isn't that fun, to be honest. but it's addicting in its own moment so that deserves to be acknowledged.

     Anyways, Cloud Meadow doesn't have a grid system and in fact many of its internal systems seem to be cobbled together with duct tape (the lack of cohesion between systems or menus is astounding, like, for example, that every vendor/shop npc you interact with has their shop button in a different place among the dialogue options, so you have to memorize where to click for each person; and they're labeled differently [only one vendor has it called shop]; otherwise you trigger a bunch of dialogue that doesn't matter every time you go to check what the weekly deals are)--- however, despite lacking a grid system, I find a certain charm in the chaos of Cloud Meadows farming gameplay. it controls terribly, to be fair, and none of it is intuitive or consistent, but it's funny and sometimes I lock in and deal with it. The major benefit the game has over Stardew Valley is that your monsters work the farm (more or less) for you in your absence, so you actually don't have to deal with the frustration of farming and you are subsequently not punished for not dealing with it. the system for assigning monsters to work on the farm is not clear and you still have to do a whole micromanaging routine to equip different guys with farm tools and keep those on the right people when you swap guys out, but the ability to tune out and not be punished is a god send, in my opinion. in all fairness, if your gameplay is me trying to figure out how to avoid your gameplay as much as possible, probably there's some kind of problem there (ahem, isaac) but I will pretend that's not the case for now.

     The crafting system is a lot of fun in Stardew Valley and slots in neatly with the other resource gathering routines. I always love crab pots and throwing your junk into the junk recyclers every night and then picking up the scraps in the morning was a fun little song and dance. I can't speak to stardew's food system, though. I know it's part of the crafting system but I rarely ever used it. I have too much of a conservationist (hoarder) disposition that I couldn't bring myself to make any food or consume and foodstuffs I had been gifted or picked up. I also never eat any food in Cloud Meadow, but I love the food making (or rather, experimenting to make) gameplay, so I spend a great deal of time tinkering with that. Basically, for whatever reason, you start out with 0 recipes and you just have to click buttons until you accidentally press foods in the right sequences as an actual recipe in the game. On paper, this is gibberish and I don't know why they made it this way, but the sheer joy of beep boop clicking random buttons and 1/10 times actually getting something popping up from it I cannot understate. Most of the time I click a sequence I've clicked before and get the same non-result, but sometimes there's a gem and when that happens I'm like :OOOOO . I think you can make any recipe you've previously made once you learn the recipe, but i've never done that. I'm just in it for the love of the game. also it's funny because sometimes you'll click all the buttons and it will be like: you made: cinnamon rolls! and what you put in was 5 rainbow fruits and everything from the pantry, and i'm just like,,, no? but thanks anyways, lol? I guess?

[^^ help manual / guide book from Cloud Meadow ^^]

     Aside from farming, the other main gameplay, in my opinion, to Stardew is the mining and dungeon crawling elements. Frankly, they kind of suck. The procedural nature that Stardew and many other games use is nice for resource gathering but, as for the gameplay, it's kind of side-eye worthy. Stardew is a farming game that happens to have a combat element and the combat is so clunky and arcane it feels punishing even when you win most of the time. I've seen speedruns and youtube videos of people clearing the whole thing in a day or getting to level 200 in the desert or whatever, and I'm glad others can find reasons to come back to that but I sure as heck haven't been able to. sadly, methinks, I guess.

     In comparison, the dungeon elements in Cloud Meadow are pretty good, I'd say. The combat, though, is... kind of sucky, but the dungeon is fun to crawl around in and has a lot of awesome art and sprite work to see. What you're supposed to do in the dungeons is never clear -- I constantly get stuck or end up missing the obscured jump pad to move on to the next section -- but it's fun to spend time there. It's very chaotic, though, and feels much disconnected from the farming aspect. I think my save file glitched somehow since i've had it since the game first came out, so I just one shot every enemy, which is fun lol and I like pressing the button on the big green lady’s moveset to have a giant tree trunk drop from the sky and send all the enemies flying. This is also to say that I never had a fight where I was even close to losing, as a result, I don't know how well balanced the combat systems are -- and i've only ever used like three characters -- but again, the sprite work is impressive and its neat team nimbus developed unique play styles and mechanics for each nonplayer character ally you can adventure with (though sometimes that means stepping on toes). After two or three hours, though, the fighting becomes more of a chore. Sure, it's fun to see what new sprites there are roaming around once the weekly migration happens, but 95% of the time I get into an encounter it's just me trying to figure out how to get out of it as quickly as I can. The loading times before and after every fight are unfortunate and lengthy. I'll talk more about the loading screens later, though. I also have no clue why the vast majority of player actions don't have keybinds -- like why does everyone have 4 move options but you're telling me I always have to individually click on which move I’m selecting and click on the tiny enemy hitbox to say who I'm attacking? Similarly, there's weird inconsistencies with regard to which moves you need to select targets for and which ones you dont and I wish any of this were better integrated. the game has a extensive guidebook you can view in the menus, with great pixel art and neat displays, but it's not that readable and the division between each of the sections only goes to show how disconnected the game's systems are -- like there 14 different tabs (i don't know about the actual number) sticking out like bookmarks from every side of the open guidebook when you pull the menu up, thus indicating that everything is cordoned off into its own separate area. all of that said. The story was fun and featured art I enjoyed, so, for that alone, I preferred the combat dimension of Cloud Meadow to that of Stardew Valley.

[^^ one of the loading screens when playing as the boy player character, showing some of the monsters you can manage on your farm ^^]

     There's no fishing in Cloud Meadow, to my knowledge, so I guess Stardew wins by default there. The true champion, however, continues to be MCC Islands fishing (continues, that is, since like 5 months ago or whenever it came out). Congrats to Etho for reaching rank 1 in the world! (still sad I messed up my screenshot with him lol)

[^^ random town npc that looks cool but, to my knowledge, can't be interacted with in any way ^^]

     I think I've said most of what I was winding up to say. I'll close out with a few more thoughts on the furry-ness of this game. It's in this way that I'm captivated by the game's art: the sensoriality, rich as fat, running in the veins of everything that's alive. In the realm of porn games, I'd say there's a bit more body diversity here than usual. While most of the characters are still attractive in a male-gaze aligned way, there's also a concerted emphasis on the tactility of flesh. This is what the hi-def sex scenes capture so well, in my opinion. In a way I'm trying to justify how attractive I find the fat, hanging penises on, for example, the male cyclopses, but what if it was something else as well. The loading screens get at the heart of the sensations the game appeals to best. Withheld only in that the game is not full furry (the player character is decidedly human), the loading screens screen flesh embracing flesh. I can imagine the warmth and the vitality. I don't know how many of the loading screen art is m/m m/f or f/f, but I think there's somewhat of a decent spread across them. But then to get back to the detriment w/r/t the sporadic updates and difficult to discover sex scenes, there are several loading screens where people are being intimate and I have no idea who they are or where they are. That takes me out a bit, but I still find them hot. But yeah, just seeing the dogboys or catgirls walking around the farm and getting to give them pats and then seeing them pause, smile, and give a bunch of <3 's; it's very :3 -coded, in my opinion. I have very rudimentary vocabulary to describe these things, but I'm working on it. You gotta incohere before you cohere.

[^^ For no particular reason (lie) here's some of my lil cyclops guys :3 ^^]

     Oh, the last thing I'll say is that the breeding system in its proximity to pokemon breeding, is a eugenics incentivizing system. Which is a bummer. The gameplay is fun, which makes it a bummer too. I wonder if there's a way to incorporate breeding and genetic systems into a game and not have it reproduce or incentivize eugenics. Compared to pokemon, I guess the way this game frames the releasing to the wild-equivalent gesture (here: letting your monster go and join society) is maybe marginally better than how pokemon does it.

     I'd say check it out if you want. Maybe worth figuring out cheats or something to circumvent the tedium. I don't know how much they're selling it for, but, as with most things, I think you're fine to pirate it if you feel like it. I'll leave the channels to do that out for now, but I can sew them in in the future.

[^^ one of the weekly vendor npcs that looks cool but, to my knowledge, can only be interacted with for to shop ^^]

[^^ random town npc that looks cool but, to my knowledge, can't be interacted with in any way ^^]

[i don't usually mention this type of thing, but ill give a disclaimer at the top that this post includes potential spoilers for poppy playtime (most relevently chapter 4 i think)]

   *note about the usage of terms such as "mascot horror:" i'm only familiar with fnaf, poppy playtime, and indigo park, in that order. as for poppy playtime, i only learned about it today, and as for indigo park, i only know about it vaguely, in passing. this is to say that it's quite possible that what i say here as applying to "mascot horror" only applies to my availability heuristic image of the genre. take that as you will.

   *note about the usage of terms such as autistic: while dsm has diagnostic criteria, im of the belief that not really such a thing as a crystalized embodiment of autism -- one autistic person is one autistic person yadda yadda. and so i mean these terms to be metonyms for that these are types of experiences.; in other words, i'm gesturing at the phenomena of chronic sensory issues, (subjects) of ableism and, in the greater extreme, ideologies of eugenics etc. (in other words: being in a body that gets read opposite by others outside of you; the propotypical example is living in what is read by others as a horrifying body when it's actually a child getting read as monstrous, or in any case nonsensical).


     OBSERVATION ONE: mascot horror as autism allegory: see for example the animatronics in the original fnaf; in the latest poppy playtime ,you have doey who is very much coded autistic; see patricia taxxon's video on dhmis. while i dont have those experiences personally, it seems like there could be affinity between what she is talking about there and whats happening in games like fnaf (sister location) and poppy playtime (idk about earlier ones, but at least as for chapter 4)

     by autism allegory, i mean to gesture at such things as a certain kind of embodiment, not being understood/read by others, and experiences of ableism and abuse. ostensibly this post is about mascot horror, however i mostly talk about poppy playtime -- i want to take a moment and diverge from that pattern as well to give examples of what i mean using fnaf, the progenitor mascot horror as case study. in fnaf (1), the animatronics are machines haunted by the spirits of dead children. i would say even when it first came out, i interpret the original intention to be something like that this game is about scary animatronics but they're actually ghost children haunting machines who don't know any better. i cant say how generalizable it is, but i think there's a way to figure the text to make it analogous to special education readings. people in special education at my high school were allowed to roam the halls during classes but during lunch and otherwise they had to stay locked in the classroom. i remember overhearing frequent ableist remarks from peers observing this routine. similar ableist sentiments would be shared when people in special education were visibly stimming in the hallways. while a reading of fnaf that maps onto some of these facts would undeniably be reductive i can synthesize easily enough the image of foxy running down the hallway humming his, "dum da da dum dum, dum da da dum dum" with images i saw in high school. i think its worth mentioning that i engaged with fnaf images at a similar time, so there could be some extent of cross contamination coloring my imagination.

      regardless of how precise a match it is, the contour is still that, in essence, fnaf characters are clunky beings [i mention this attempting to suggest dyspraxia and other disabilities which are often comorbid with autism; also just the general way that living in an autistic body can intercept one's vestibular sense -- see also pain tolerances and things in this vein] for whom their guardians and other people who hold power over them often don't understand (or misunderstand) what they're trying to communicate.

     i think its also worth cautioning that being autistic / disabled does not mean just being a child, as sometimes the stereotype can be, and so the facts that the fnaf animatronics are [supposedly "just"] children -- anyways, i could see how that could be misconstrued as saying this other thing. i don't know the precise verbiage, but its nevertheless my understanding that people in the autistic community find resonances with the image of being a child. the proper way of clarifying this would be something like, the socialized platonic conception of a "child" has overlapping characteristic with being austistic, such as being misunderstood by people older than you or being not as much able to read social cues. context dependent etc., but i've seen permutations of child metaphors expressed by a number of autistic people. and so that is to say that in these fictional texts where the fact of a character being a child is not literal, i think there's room for reading some of these children as narrative short hand for being autistic. in any case, mascot horror games are often about how children are ostracized and abused by people in power; both these criteria can also apply to autistic people.

[^^ Doey the Doughman ^^]

     >>the most concrete example in the latest chapter of poppy playtime i would say would be doey, the doughman -- a new character for the chapter. i think he's a deutorogonist or whatever the term is. they're technically a good guy, but then the player has to do a boss battle against them after the player (unintentionally?) backstabs doey; doey comments on sensory topics frequently. the one i remember the most is during the boss fight (when he's crashing out) and he just keeps repeating over and over again "too loud" "too loud" "too loud" in a writhing sort of pain. see also doey's death by hydraulic press (ive heard expressed from other adhders and autistics something like the desire to be crushed by a hydraulic press; usually this is metonymic for a desire for some compressive for to deal with sensory regulation issues -- nevertheless, the image [and being crushed by it] have neurodivergent connotations)

     >>is doey as system a reading worth considering? i think so, and it's interesting the various ways that the series is playing around with system characters right now; though it seems to be baffling people not familiar with the identity and pronoun usage (is my reading of game theory reaction to characters i read as system-coded) ; see also, patricia taxxon's video about its recent considerations of whether she is a system and what that means for them -- notably that one of the alters is specifically rambley raccoon from indigo park, (the mascot from the mascot horror game); i haven't heard anything suggesting it sees her experience in an autistic body as related to the condiseration of its host as potentially hosting a system

     >>kissy, another poppy playtime character (the gender swapped version of huggy wuggy, the series' main mascot) -- from chapter 2 onward -- is coded as nonverbal, i think (ive only really watched part 4 [and then gone back and watched some theory videos from the past few years] but is my reading from what i saw)

     >>sticking still with poppy playtime; it seems like there's a trend in the children patients (who get tortured and experimented on) that the ones explicitly mentioned in the provided documents are often stated to be troublesome (in a personality disorder kind of way -- iirc , something like that language gets used explicitly)

[^^ Kissy ^^]

     with this, its worth giving a disclaimer that i think there's an argument to be made that portions of what (poppy playtime) speaks to maps onto disability in a more generalized sense. we're still less that 100 years away from the holocaust, and so its probably impossible not to read images of people in gas chambers and not think of the nazi genocide. i would also point to eugenics in the japanese context -- which was a wartime and especially postwar policy. the holocaust, that is, did not target exclusively jewish people. Nazi eugenics also targetted romani people, disable people and people who would now be considered queer and trans (among others). of course, there can be and often is a large amount of overlap between the categories. Being jewish, for example, doesn't mean you couldn't also be disabled (my sense -- and i don't have any numbers by my side when saying this -- is that especially as the concentration camps became more industrialized, so to speak, disability would have also emerged from within the inprisoned population. given that i mentioned autism in the previous paragraph, though, its also worth considering what used to be classified as aspergers, what was the result of asperberger's (a nazi) study into neurodivergent people who might be able to weaponize their disability for the nazi cause. Being autistic doesn't mean being a nazi or having a superpower, but the classification of aspergers has these contexts and histories. I don't know that much about poppy playtime, but it seems like in characters such as the doctor, there could be some parallels to these types of nazi ideologies around disability and eugenics. that the non-human non-player characters are titled "experiments" lends a similar image as the various nazi projects of white supremacy (experimenting on prisoners through torture et cetera -- what we see in poppy playtim as well).

     whatever is going on with religion in poppy playtime i don't know. possible this could relate to nazism and the occult -- certainly the cult personality of hitler could be made an argument for

     also, game theory refuses to mention it, but the historical context of poppies shouldn't be waived away too readily -- what with the opium war and the proceeding century plus of colonial/semicolonial teriterrialization of east asia, especially china and hong kong. though i have no idea how that fits into the text and contrary to the holocaust, this is over a century year old, so it's perhaps an unfortunate side effect of a symbol selected for other purposes

[^^ Poster for 赤い天使 / Red Angel (1966), a film about Japan's wartime eugenics practices which targeted disabled people ^^]

     OBSERVATION TWO: modern day periodical release : though a more orchestrated version, compare it to , say, great expectations or the scarlet gang of asakusa , that model of releasing (granted thats mostly with literature and this is a different thing). there are other similar things in current popular culture such as fan fiction that are periodic and also literary. differences in all of these things and so i dont mean to be saying stuff is direct syllogism. neverthless i find the affinity (possibility for) interesting and worth considering further in the future.

     >>the comparison point for what would make mascot horror distinguished would be -- looking at poppy playtime -- the portal games in comparison to poppy playtime. there's probably a case to be made for fnaf or other mascot horror games, but i don't know much about other mascot horror games and fnaf doesn't have a strong genealogy for what to compare it to in terms of genre precedents. While portal still engages in storytelling across installments (and, crucially, across media -- this is a component of present day video game story telling which i think deserves more consideration), i would argue that each portal game is more conclusively telling its own story, and its thus more so the case that these are separate stories in the same continuity, versus poppy playtime which is explicitly (as for the games) one story being released in multiple installments. My sense though is that there's not a strict bifurcation, and thus there's some kind of leniency for what counts as installment and what doesn't. (For example the hunger game book series -- probably this is not installments, but then the move adaptation for the third book released in installments [what is an increasing trend for movie rollout])

     >>something to be considered about what a "work" of art is. one complaint i saw frequently for the wicked movie that came out in december 2024 was that this movie is so long and yet is only the first act of the musical, what gives? that is, i saw people frustrated with that this finished movie released as an unfinished story. i feel that there's room for complication in this regard.

     >>i almost can't not think that poppy playtime in part exists just to canonize mat pat's notorious theory about portal cubes being made of human flesh; as has been discussed for however long its been since that video came out (see portalpilled's video "Debunking EVERY point of Game Theory's Portal Companion Cube video.") it seems pretty likely that this reading of portal is not what the storytellers / game designers were going for with their narrative / story world. however, given that poppy playtime is in some way spelling out an almost identical articulation of this idea (in broad strokes , so maybe that undoes the almost identical ness), i would say the intentionality of the text going into it not only makes the reading more valid, but also lets the reading open up more considerations of the text, its themes, and its world




(note about my misconceptions: poppy is not huggy, poppy is some doll?? and the whole thing, i didnt ever know beyond the scary huggy images, huh -- i never knew what it was all about)
(to preface for this last point: i still haven't played fnaf and i've only just now watched parts of a playthough of poppy playtime, but seeing poppy playtime chapter 4, im even more baffled by how security breach but moreso ruin came out. i can pretend that its understandable with security breach given that its an open world [theoretically] game -- though the supreme-unoptimization is still side-eye-worthy -- so ruin thus bears the greater brunt of this 'what happened bro?' as its gameplay is linear in a roughly equivalent way)