Hypocrite's Haunt

   A few months ago, I picked up Prey during a Steam sale and then played the entire thing through in a single weekend. Even though I’m not exactly the biggest fan of sci-fi, Prey was an amazing immersive sim that tickled me in all the right ways – an interesting, well-built world, an impactful skill system that changes the way you play the game, and a cool story (even if the ending was a little abrupt). Having had my interest in immersive sims re-kindled, I took the opportunity to grab the other Arkane game I haven’t yet had the chance to play – Dishonored 2. Unfortunately, it wasn’t… exactly up to the standards of Prey, which is understandable considering they released Dishonored 2 a year before. But I’m glad that Arkane seemed to have taken the lessons they learnt from making Dishonored and applied it admirably in Prey. In particular, I found that the opening and tutorials of the two games were the biggest indicators of the difference between the two, and shows exactly how ...

       Zaum – a literary and social experiment by Futurist poets in early 20 th century Russia, an attempt by these artists to create their own language in order to transcend beyond the inhibiting influence of politics, society, and economics to form a universal tongue that speaks to the hearts of people. The work produced in this “language” was, for the most part, entirely incomprehensible to anyone else other than the writers. Words only make sense to us because of the centuries – millennia – spent impressing upon those meaningless noises with our own understanding. Zaum was a private language, understood only by those who have a personal connection to it. "Dyr bul shchyl," by Aleksei Kruchenykh... the poem goes:  Dyr bul shchyl ubeshshchur skum vy so bu r l èz      Disco Elysium is a game developed by a company called ZA/UM. The game is (mostly) comprehensible, unlike the Futurists’ language. But the game does resemble this language in one k...

     Jujutsu Kaisen was last season’s (Fall 2020) shonen to watch. Published by Jump and animated by MAPPA, everything was set for it to become the next hot thing after My Hero Academia. With that said, I should tell all of you that I usually avoid these types of shows like the plague. I watched only the first season of HeroAca and gave Black Clover, Fire Force, Blue Exorcist, and the rest a wide berth. It only took me a few shows in the beginning of my journey with anime for me to tire of the repeated tropes - main characters whose main personality traits were limited to being a super nice guy (it’s always a guy), a massive rotating cast of characters, an ostracized MC marked by a distinct disadvantage that turns out to be a surprising advantage (Midoriya’s lack of a quirk, Black Clover’s MC not having magic or whatever). I initially treated Jujutsu Kaisen the same way I did the others - I ignored it in favor of the slice of life of the season. But then, I read an artic...