Non-Fiction

Peril and Hope on Road 96

I got it because its pitch—you play as a desperate teenager in a totalitarian petrol state sneaking penniless toward the border, hoping to find freedom—resonated with the desperation that was bubbling up from the floorboards of my heart: a flood of the pandemic, climate change, growing rightwing violence and agitation, an Hieronymus Bosch painting’s worth of leering demagogues and sycophants. Worst of all, the people who should be helping fight all this from their seats of power seem all but absent.

Surrogate Father Simulator 2

I wondered, as I twirled the wheel on my controller, because that’s how you reel in a fish, if that’s the intrinsic appeal of RDR2. I wondered if the thing that makes the game more than a series of challenges and rewards is that it provides the player access to some imagined rendition of their father.

War

Holland has sent me an INSULT. I do not know what it is, only that it is rude enough I now have an excuse to start a war against them. I don’t want to start a war with anyone outside of the French cultural pentagon. I don’t know how to win a Big War.

Becoming Mammoths, Becoming Trafficlights

From a white rabbit, to some dead grass, to a snow particle, and descending inside myself until I became a hydrogen atom wandering into a burnt green nothingness occasionally punctuated by wayward bacteria.

Log Off

The third thing the guild really, really cares about is if anyone does anything nice for me, specifically. The guild really, really cares about this because I’m a girl.