Hypocrite's Haunt

This is a long comment I made on Youtube as a response to Rick Beato's video, which was called " Why Gen Z Doesn't Care About Music ." For those that don't know, Rick Beato runs a Youtube channel focused on music from the latter half of the 20th century, with guitar tutorials and interviews with famous musicians. I discovered him through Adam Neely, who is another musician with a Youtube channel focused on jazz and bass. I first saw the video pop up on my feed a few days ago, but the very obvious clickbait title irritated me so much that I refused to click on it just to make a point. But today, my resolve wavered and I indulged in the mean-spirited, scandal-mongering, mob-rage part of my soul - and so I watched it. I thought the only thing I would be doing was rolling my eyes and going "OK boomer" under my breath. But to my surprise, he immediately singled-out video games as the most important reason that Gen Z doesn't care about music (allegedly). U...

Hades , the critically acclaimed rogue-like by star indie developer Supergiant, was a massive step forward in narrative storytelling through video games. The script, written by Greg Kasavin, stretched to over 300,000 words - but this novel-length text was not spat out at the player through paragraphs upon paragraphs of lore, but rather integrated into the game as part of its dynamically reactive narrative, through dialogue and narration. These hundreds of thousands of words are not written for every player; rather, they exist for every possibility, such that when a player experiences an event unique to them, the game will be able to recognize and acknowledge what the player has done.  The example of this everyone has at least heard of is with the boss of the first area, Megaera. She, of course, has tons of variation in her dialogue, keeping the encounter feeling like a genuine conversation between two characters, rather than just repeated generic dialogue. But Supergiant goes even ...

On Wednesday, the tenth of November, the constitutional court of Thailand ruled that the three major figures of a pro-democracy protest from last year were guilty of trying to overthrow the monarchy. One judge claimed that any attempt to “weaken or undermine” the monarchy was tantamount to an attempt to destroy the institution – and therefore, it is an act of treason, an attempt to destroy the country’s system of government. In Thailand, treason is punishable by death.   Milan Kundera said in his book The Unbearable Lightness of Being that metaphors were dangerous. Let’s see how dangerous they are then, shall we?   Protesters in Thailand fight so that our country can return to the rightful and legitimate form of governance – a fair democracy with a monarch as the figurehead. The court accuses them of trying to overthrow the “constitutional democracy.”   A general overthrows a democratically elected government and rewrites the constitution to remain in power t...

            In The Unbearable Lightness of Being , the main character, Tomas, noted that it was only because of a string of coincidences that he ended up meeting, and falling in love, with his partner, Tereza, and that if anything was even slightly different, she could have been spending the rest of her life with a different man. My meeting with this book itself was a similar, if much less dramatic, collision of chance. I had read another of Kundera’s book in a class on Czech literature – it was The Joke – and therefore was familiar with his biography and the themes he played with in his works. Nevertheless, I never got around to reading his most popular book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being . Years of mandatory readings have left me burnt out on literature, and it wasn’t until I went through a year of business school that I regained a hunger for stories. Near the end of my time at that university, I was moving out and had dumped a bunch of my stuf...

                 I wanted to love Sing Yesterday for Me , I really did. The premise was solid – a seinen show focused on the post-graduate ennui as reality crashes into and destroys the idealistic hopes of youth. The main character, Rikuo Uozumi, languishes in his angst after graduating from university, unable to bear the tedium and frustration of job hunting and thus preferring to simply work a dead-end job at a convenience store. Watching as his friends get jobs, get married, and get on with their lives while he wallows in his self-pity, Uozumi is similar to other characters like Hyouka ’s Oreki or Oregairu ’s Hachiman in their apathy. Because of this, I had hopes of an interesting social drama developing along with the main theme of moving from the past. Instead, what I found was a terrible soap opera that plays fast and loose with character development, wrapping up with a slipshod and unsatisfying ending.     ...

          This week for Parallel Play , I’ll be cheating a little bit; I didn’t play Hades and Children of Morta simultaneously. I had in fact finished Hades a good while back after it came out of early access. But since I just finished Morta and Hades has just arrived on Gamepass, there is probably no better time to write about these games.   As always: spoilers below for both these games, so beware!             Most people won’t need an introduction to Hades since it’s been massively successful to the point of being nominated (and winning) tons of awards for Game of the Year. But in case you’ve been living under a rock (or not as much of a nerd as I am), Hades is the newest game to come from the acclaimed halls of Supergiant, a superstar indie studio I absolutely adore. It’s a rogue-like based on Greek mythology, with the conceit being that you are Zagreus, son of underworld-god Hades, and are trying ...

                      A few weeks ago, I made a post about the fascinating and impressive Hearts of Iron 4 mod, Red Flood . What made that mod great was the refreshing new take on world history, a new perspective that changed up the old rules of alternative history. This week, however, I’ll be talking about another HOI4 mod – but this time it’s one that is even further from reality than the last. I’m of course talking about Old World Blues , the total overhaul mod based on the Fallout universe. The current state of the mod focuses on the western half of the continental United States, although it is slowly moving eastward (it now includes some parts of the Midwest, like Colorado and Oklahoma). I’m honestly impressed with the progress the developers had made; they’ve not only introduced new regions with interesting and unique countries and focus trees, but they’ve also added cool new mechanics that didn’t exist in the base...