I have always taken it as a definitional point of pride for Generation X that our childhood of the 1970s and 80s was the final one sentenced to live every day in fear of nuclear annihilation, which on some days seemed like a near certainty. We rejoiced as the Soviet Union fell just as we emerged into adulthood, like a graduation gift felt around the world: Congratulations, you made it. You have all outlived the thing trying to kill you and everyone you love. Fear no more! And since then, it has been the solemn burden of we Gen Xers to tell the generations after ours how lucky they have it, growing up without this terror.

But a thing I learned from Annie Jacobsen’s crushingly grim 2024 book Nuclear War is that my cohort can set this burden down. In the early 90s, the chances of nuclear conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union dropped to zero, sure, by dint of one of those nations ceasing to exist. But the thousands of nuclear weapons possessed by the Soviets did not vanish into fairy dust, and nor did the people who knew how they worked, nor the knowledge to produce more weapons like them. And so three decades later, to hear some experts tell it—the experts that Jacobsen interviews—we are closer to nuclear holocaust than ever before.

It seems plausible that our culture, kids included, simply cares less about nuclear war now. I don’t have any kids, so I’m not sure whether it is a common playground topic the way it was for my classmates. But with culture so fragmented into innumerable online shards, instead of bound together by a handful of shared television networks, I rather assume that young people today aren’t as obsessed with the topic as all of my friends and I were. So many other crises pull at modern kids’ attention all day long, and give them plenty of other reasons for nightmares.

Into this setting drops Nuclear War, and it wants to refresh the cultural focus around its title topic.

Jacobsen’s book carries the subtitle A Scenario, and it makes clear that it speculates one way that things could go down, if worse comes to worst. But the scenario is presented not as precognition but as framework to shock the reader into horror and hatred for nuclear weapons. I can envision its scenario presenting a terrible novelty for a younger reader, who had no idea that instantaneous, irrevocable, and extremely literal destruction of the world is one bad decision away, at every moment. And in the case of older readers like me, the book rattles us into dropping the misconceptions of safety that we’ve held all of our lives.

The most profound shock, delivered again and again through elapsed-time readouts in the title of each short chapter, is how fast everything happens. The total running time of the war in Jacobsen’s scenario, from North Korea firing a single ICBM at Washington to the US and Russia emptying out their full nuclear arsenals at one another, is barely over an hour. If you started a movie and set your phone to Do Not Disturb a minute before that first ICBM fired, human civilization would end before credits rolled. Which they wouldn’t, because an EMP burst probably wrecked your TV, especially if you were sitting literally anywhere in the continental United States. Also you’d probably be blind or dying of rapid-onset radiation sickness if you hadn’t already turned to ash, been impaled by glass, or crushed under rubble from any of the thousands of nuclear fireballs and pressure waves ravaging the entire northern hemisphere all at once. Or swept away by a flood from a dam that malfunctioned because of that same EMP burst. And so on.

It’s the speed that kills you, in nuclear war. Nobody has time to think about anything. Reagan famously lamented out loud how an American president would have only six minutes to decide how to respond to an incoming nuclear weapon, and that fact hasn’t changed today. Jacobsen’s scenario shows how, under this impossible timeline, the kinds of miscommunication found in any stressful situation can easily muddle even the most heroic attempts to avert a worst-case scenario. Once one person launches so much as a single weapon at a nuclear superpower for any reason at all—especially a nation with a hair-trigger “launch on warn” nuclear policy, such as the United States—every road leads to global annihilation, in the theory that this book adheres to.

Jacobsen uses the phrase “zeroed out” several times to summarize the effect of a general nuclear war, with ten thousand years of human progress reset in just a few minutes. The aftermath would not be a sexy Fallout land of high adventure where plucky survivors comb through the crumbling ruins of modern buildings seeking high-tech treasures. There’s nothing left. Every piece of standing human achievement from Stonehenge onwards is obliterated.

In the concluding chapter, Jabobsen spends time with contemporary archaeologists studying an intriguing site, an ancient earthwork containing manufactured objects and structures in a part of the world where nobody expected to find such things. But the objects are all shattered, their purposes frustratingly obscure. We can only guess as to the intentions of the people who made them. Jacobsen suggests that, 25,000 years after the last nuclear submarine launches its final MIRV and the earth has healed enough to support agriculture again, the distant descendants of modern humans—if there are any—would be lucky to find even this much trace of our own cultures.

I took a bunch of other notes about details I’ve had wrong my whole life: how ballistic missiles work in the first place, for instance, and why they’re essentially impossible to stop, once launched. (You can still try, in the same why that you can try to stop a bullet in flight by shooting it with another bullet. It has about the same chance of success.) But that’s not what the book’s about. I learned about Nuclear War from a Warren Ellis blog post, where he mentions that Denis Villeneuve has optioned the book for a film adaptation. “The book is a relentless horror and nobody will thank him for bringing that to cinematic life,” Ellis muses, and I don’t suppose I would either, but I’d watch it anyway.

This book hurt me, it shook me and slapped me across the face, and I needed the wake-up. So did my inner ten-year-old, with his memories, and his nightmares.

There’s a part where Jacobsen really twists the knife, having us watch as the animal residents of the Smithsonian Zoo—among the most innocent of all American immigrants—perish in confusion, pain, and flame in the first minutes of the conflict. If there is a movie made of this book, then I hope that scene is preserved, lingeringly. Let that be the image I carry with me from this experience. I don’t know yet how this book has changed the course of my life, and I can’t know if any of it ultimately matters. But let me press the image of those burning animals to my heart. Give me the scar.

I’ve either shown up on or straight-ahead launched a number of podcasts in and around the video-gamey space over the past year. Here is what they are!

Venthuffer

I have launched Venthuffer, a weekly audio zine:

Venthuffer is a series of monologues about the Steam Deck video game console. I realized in 2024 that I have become as much of a fan of this machine as I have for any piece of digital hardware since my years of deep identification with the Apple Macintosh, when I was much younger. This discovery surprised me a little, and I wanted a space to explore the reasons for it, out loud. Here it is.

As the rest of its About page states, I’m shooting for ten short, scripted episodes. I’ll make more if I find that there’s still plenty of gas in the tank after that, but I’m not banking on it; Jmac’s Arcade felt complete after only six episodes, after all. But this is a new topic, and a new (which is to say older) me, so who can say.

Listen to the first episode of Venthuffer here.

The launch of Venthuffer got a very kind writeup by Jay Springett, too.

Topic Lords

Back at the top of the year, I had a fantastic time guesting on Topic Lords, a long-running weekly chat show hosted by Jim Stormdancer. The episode I’m on is 224: Following A Garden Hose Around In The Dark, also featuring Nathan Fouts of Mommy’s Best Games.

Our hour-and-ten conversation was so much fun—and, honestly, so well edited—that I have relistened to the episode a couple of times, just to make myself happy. Topics include jukebox griefing, experiments with nail painting, the science behind color displays, and crackpot theories around a pen-doodle Bach once made.

I should also note that Bumpy Grumpy, the “lost arcade classic” which Nathan mentions on the episode as his then-current project, has since launched on Steam, and it’s fantastic. Charming, delightfully simple to learn, and quite satisfying to get good at. I achieved the Best Ending with it only last month, after pumping countless pretend quarters into it over several months. (And, yes, it plays great on Steam Deck.)

Third Strongest Podcast

In the Third Strongest Podcast, Ryan Veeder, Sarah Willson, and Zach play through EarthBound, a most peculiar and still-celebrated JRPG released on Nintendo consoles circa 1995. The podcast is 25 episodes long, and somehow I appear on six of them—granted, two are “extrasodes” outside of the main series. You can pick them out by control-effing for my name on the show’s webpage, but honestly you should just listen to the whole series, whether or not you’ve played EarthBound.

In fact, I only started playing EarthBound after listening to the first episode of Third Strongest. (The game is readily available on Switch, through that console’s first-party online emulator.) I emailed the hosts about this fact, and they all got so excited about this bizarre turn that they kept inviting me on to talk about my experiences as a new EarthBound player, versus someone who has played through this game over and over since childhood. I feel like I might have ended up talking about comic books a little too much but I’m still pleased wth my performance.

When preparing to record the first episodes of Venthuffer, I happened across the introduction that I had recorded for the final episode of Third Strongest. I am grateful for the trio’s very kind invitation for me to do this, and I realize now that the pleasure I rediscovered from scripting, recording, and editing a very short monologue about a video game helped inspire Venthuffer, even if it took a while longer to find its hook. So there’s that!

Third Strongest is only one example of a tightly scoped, limited-length podcast series that these hosts have produced. I am compelled to point also to The Complete Guide to Koholint, a show with exactly 256 episodes where each one finds Ryan and Zach deeply discussing a single tile of the 16-by-16 playfield from the original Game Boy edition of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. And the episode selector on its webpage is exactly what it ought to be.

The time has come for my quadrennial spell, the one I accidentally cast in 2016 and then cast again with purpose in 2020. And thus do I create a blog post before November with the correct title, and so the ritual is already executed to the letter. For the sake of propriety, I shall remain at the lectern for the length of a few more paragraphs.

On Sunday I stood in a neighborhood early-voting line and then cast my ballot for Harris and Walz, and proceeded to fill in all the Democratic circles down-ticket. I wish I had more of a choice in this matter, but I don’t. As in 2020, there is still only one viable political party in the United States with any interest in governance at the state or federal level. Four years ago I was hoping it’d be different by now, but it isn’t.

The other party has vanished completely into an authoritarian personality cult around one man who offers his supporters the chance to melt their personal identities into his own, so that they can enjoy the vicarious thill as he tries to use the full powers of the executive branch to wreck the pillars of national order and punish both individual political opponents and whole populations whom he finds distasteful.

My fellow citizens have every right to feel fearful, hateful, or just bored enough to want that future for themselves, and they are free to vote for its realization. I sincerely hope that their lives improve, somehow and someday, and allow their strangled and suffering hearts to let more air and sunshine in. But until then, I would encourage American readers of this blog to join me in outvoting them. Everything I wrote to my friends not voting for Biden in 2020 holds true today. We don’t vote for candidates whose policies we agree with 100 percent. We vote for the ones who, among those who have a reasonable chance of winning, promise to steer the state in the direction we find most agreeable—which, yes, you can also read as least-disagreeable. And today that means Harris, Walz, and all the Democrats and only the Democrats, up and down the ballot.

This year, when I say “be prepared for a Harris victory”, I mean it in the sense of “Nobody knows what’s going to happen”. Now, or ever. I have lost patience with social-media trends that insist that if Event X happens, then they can tell you exactly the chain of events that will follow. Nobody knows this, in any circumstance, when it comes to something as naturally chaotic as national-scale politics or larger. I saw this come to a crescendo when Biden dropped out and I saw immediate wailing from many otherwise rational people that the election was therefore handed to the Magas. They were proven wrong within days, of course: Biden’s action put the Democrats back into play again. This was the event that made me sure of only one thing in high-level politcs: nobody knows what’s going to happen.

I want to encourage you to take a page from the Stoics, here. While you can and should participate in this election, you can’t know or control its outcome, no more than you can know or control the election’s repercussions after it happens. What you can do is prepare by working on yourself. I know the stance I will hold if Harris wins, and the one I’ll hold if she doesn’t. I have the benefit of practice and experience here–and so do you. You can imagine yourself inhabiting these two futures, murky as they are, and think about the wellsprings of hope in your life that you can draw strength from, allowing you to stand in resolute self-definition for yourself, for your family, your community, your world.

Whatever happens, you’ll need that. I need you to do that. We all need to stand together here and be the best people we can be, as the world swirls and storms around us. That’s all we can do.

Look, they’ve chosen a four-letter abbreviation for themselves, just like another authoritarian movement from a century ago, so why not use it instead of recycling that old one with all of its deniable baggage?

Use it as a noun. Call them “magas”. Each individual member is a “maga”.

Magas aren’t generic History Channel villains. They’re a uniquely American threat, one that deserves to be met with specificity. Practice saying its name with a fleck of acid from the back of your throat. #uspol

https://masto.nyc/@jmac/113385813973250608

I posted the above a day or two after I saw someone else adapt the old saw that goes something like “History has a word for people who helped Nazis even though they didn’t call themselves Nazis, and that word is ‘Nazis’.” They swapped out “Nazi” with “Republican MAGA supporters”, and that seemed to make the pattern lose all its punch. So why not just “Magas”?

News about the rally in Madison Square Garden on Sunday night made me tap out this acerbic bit over breakfast today. I finally did a “My posts do not necessarily represent the opinions of […]” disclaimer to my Mastodon bio, and now’s as good a time as any to start exercising it.

What immediately strikes me about this film is how none of the characters are obviously relatable. All the increasingly scarred and limping main characters are motivated by a shared sociopathic sexual fetish which shuts them away from the audience.

The tension between protagonist and antagonist lies in how far they’re willing to go for gratification. That’s the film’s sole grab-handle of character identification. But the movie makes you lurch for it, desperately, as it rolls over and over.

https://masto.nyc/@jmac/113357675139509617

I felt something more raw and personal while watching this, too. One is tempted to tie this into how we lost Pete, how cars and trucks and buses have mangled and murdered my family time and again, the smoldering revulsion that I will always carry for motor vehicles. But this movie isn’t interested in pedestrians; it says so itself, in so many words.

Rather, for all the movie’s scenes of desperate coupling amidst terrible violence and wreckage, it brings back an unforgettable night that my wife and I spent in each others’ arms: that singular Tuesday in early November of 2016. The clocks struck midnight as every needle on the New York Times digital front page twitched red, red, red. We held each other in the gathering dark, shocked, trembling.

The crashes kept coming after that, didn’t they? Blow after blow, ever-deeper bruising accumulating as one’s psyche is time and again thrown and mashed against the inside of one’s body. “It feels like the traffic on the streets has tripled since the accident, doesn’t it?” Yes, it did.

And we’re going to do get back into that car in two weeks. Back on the highway to see how much of that old feeling we’ll recapture, in the chase, in the moment of inevitable, uncontrolled climax as the wheels hit the median. And if the worst fails to happen, and the thrill of having it all crumple and burn around and into us is denied us?

Well then, maybe the next one, darling. Maybe the next one.

I was a child of the Reagan administration whose immediate family—Silent Generation parents and Baby Boomer siblings—had a complex and largely negative relationship with social or recreational drugs. As such, my culture at every level inculcated a strong anti-drug stance that would make me permanently uninterested in hard drugs, and would delay my experimentation with milder substances. I didn’t try brewing coffee until I was 20, and I didn’t buy beer for the first time before I was 30. After that, I remained cautious about trying any drugs that had been illegal and culturally demonized earlier in my life.

Last year, a friend helped me try cannabis for the first time in a controlled setting. They give me half of a THC-infused gummy, and then let me hang out at their place for the next few hours, lying on their couch while they played Tears of the Kingdom on their Nintendo. The effects of this abbreviated dose were mild and pleasant, with my friend texting my partner Amy how I’d fallen fast asleep at one point.

Now that I have returned to freelancing, with more control over my daily schedule, I made up my mind to experiment with cannabis further. Last month, a few days before a flight, I marched into one of the few legal dispensaries in Manhattan and bought two tins of the same weed-gummy brand my friend had shared with me. One tin had gummies treated with THC and a mixture of other additives to resemble indica, the strain of cannabis that is generally regarded as more relaxing. The other mixed in CBD to emulate a hybrid of indica with sativa, the more energizing strain. I wasn’t following any sort of experimental schedule, here; trying two kinds seemed apt, and those looked as good as any, from a cold start.

I have sampled these gummies four times, with differing contexts and observed effects. I share a log of my experiences here in part to organize my own thoughts about it, and also as a public service for others with a similar curiosity about the effects of edibles. My experiences are my own, and represent a mere slice of the possible, but they’re what happened.

Hybrid, half dose, airport

Hours before leaving for the flight, I cut one of the hybrid gummies in half, and ate half immediately. I am a nervous flier, and the power of edibles as a relatively safe and inexpensive antidote for air-jitters was something multiple friends had described to me. I put the other half in a sandwich baggie and threw it in my backpack, figuring I might like it for the flight back home, and not daring to take more than that.

All advice I could find online said that traveling through TSA with edibles is technically not allowed. TSA operates under federal laws, and the federal government still regards cannabis as a controlled substance, even if an increasing number of states have growing tolerance for the drug. But—the advice continued—TSA agents are busy enough already that they’re unlikely to care about seeing some edibles, and the worst that can happen is that they’ll make you toss them out.

Still, the dose was enough to make me feel a ratcheted-up sense of caution verging into, yes, paranoia. Because I ate the half-dose too early, it started hitting just as we got to the airport, and I must have looked quite nervous as I watched my bag vanish into the scanner. And then, with a terrible sense of inevitability, an agent pulled me aside for a thorough pat-down—but not due to anything in my bag, which went through the scan unmolested, even if I didn’t. And then I was sent on my way, one half still in my bag and the other fizzing behind my eyes.

I don’t think the drug made this flight any easier. All around, I think I got the dosage, the timing, and the strain all wrong. In retrospect, I should have kept all of my first experiments at home, until I had a better sense of my personal reactions and tolerances.

Hybrid, half dose, hotel

Our flight home got canceled due to weather, and for convoluted reasons outside of our control Amy and I had to return home on two rescheduled flights, separated by a full day. Frustrated and not wishing to repeat the mistakes of last time, I ate the other half during my last night away, and whiled away the evening alone in the hotel.

It was all fine. With nothing stressful happening, the mild dose encouraged me to just fart around online a bit and play the new edition of Riven on my Steam Deck until it was time for bed. I considered doing some work, but felt resistance against pushing my brain towards that kind of organized thinking, much like when I’ve had a beer or two. I didn’t otherwise feel any noteworthy effects.

Hybrid, full dose, home

The following Saturday, after dinner, I announced my intent to try a full dose of the same gummy variety. Amy made a statement of benign acknowledgment and turned her attention back to her No Man’s Sky expedition, and so I proceeded. I stayed home for the whole experience and was able to observe myself in a completely comfortable environment.

I have to admit that I was surprised at how many stereotypical effects of pot visited me, this time. I learned that it takes my body around 90 minutes to digest the gummy enough to start releasing the drug into my blood, because that’s when my eyes turned red. I could feel it happening—a light prickling sensation—and went to the mirror to confirm it. A growing sense of woozy weight and lagginess of motion soon followed.

I hadn’t prepared any particular activities for myself, so I simply crossed the apartment—carefully—and lay down in bed. There, I experienced a number of interesting perceptual effects from the drug:

• I enjoyed an auditory hallucination of our neighbors’ air conditioners sounding a lot like a pounding surf outside the apartment window. I thought, “I bet I can convince myself that I’m not in Manhattan, but I’m at actually resting in a lovely beach house.” I closed my eyes, I was instantly in that beach house, even though I was also aware that I wasn’t. It was great fun.

• I kept my eyes closed and let my mind drift. I visited homes and other places from my past, and either could remember their interior layouts in stunning detail, or hallucinated that I could. Either way, I explored these spaces with a clarity of visualization that I generally can’t achieve while sober.

• Without meaning to, I fixated on details from the No Man’s Sky soundtrack I hadn’t noticed before, picking out leitmotifs in the background music as Amy explored the galaxy, and finding it quite clever and beautiful.

A little later, as I sat on the couch and watched Amy play, I continued to be struck by singular elements of the game’s sound effects. At one point, while she wandered around a space station, a certain rhythmic pumping or pulsing sound in the backdrop captured my attention completely. I tried to tell her about it but I couldn’t express it in any sensible way.

Then we watched an episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks and I enjoyed it even though I had absolutely no ability to follow the plot; the characters’ motivations from scene to scene left no trace of an impression on my short-term memory. Putting effort into remembering resulted in such a mental strain that I gave up trying in short order. Writing this, I couldn’t tell you a single thing that happened during the episode. This is not the show’s fault.

As for gustatory effects, my appetite did ratchet up and stay constant for the length of the high, just like the jokes say. It was entirely mental: my guts didn’t request more food, but it seemed like a swell idea anyway. This is how I discovered the surprising intensity that strong flavors carried. In particular, we happened to have a bag of orange jelly candies, and they absolutely overwhelmed me. Normally I find these candies mildly sweet and pleasant, but under the drug’s influence they were quite literally and simply one of the most delicious things I had ever tasted. I ate only a few, very slowly. Magnificent.

I sobered up completely by bedtime. The whole experience from consuming the gummy to coming down lasted around five hours.

Indica, full dose, home

About ten days later I found myself in an inexplicably foul mood with little to be done for it, so it seemed like an apt time to continue the experiment by trying one of the indica-only gummies. Now that I had a better sense of timing, I ate it a bit before dinner, and managed to accomplish some chores and tasks before the effects arrived.

I have fewer interesting notes here, in part because I performed less mental exploration, and also because—I suspect—of the difference in cannabis strain. Hallucination and fixation were absent this time. Instead, I felt something like a deep but soft-edged drunkenness; my bad mood melted away and I felt quite relaxed and chill, just like it said on the tin. (Literally: the two flavors I purchased were labeled “Balance” and “Chill”, respectively.) I mentioned this to Amy, while in the depths of it, and she remarked that I wasn’t acting particularly drunk from her perspective. That seemed like a positive.

After things got started I watched the film Hundreds of Beavers and had a marvelous time all by myself. Once again, I kept forgetting the main character’s motivation and history from scene to scene, but the plot of this particular film is so simple that I could grasp it again with a little conscious effort. (I enjoyed the film so much that I watched it a second time while sober two days later, and do count it among my favorite movies now.)

You know that I had some more of those orange candies. I also sampled some mint-chip ice cream, and some peanut butter. The latter is one of my favorite foods, and to my delight I found a new savory depth to its flavor, an earthy nuttiness I don’t normally taste.

The length of the high seemed a little longer than before, but not by much. Maybe six hours from gummy to landing.

Where to from here

I look forward to more experiments from home, and want to more carefully prepare some snacks and different kinds of media—music, in particular—ahead of time. I’d also like to try purposefully meditating, or just doing nothing and letting my mind wander more; the more sativa-emulating edibles might be more appropriate for that.

I don’t expect that I’ll write another public journal about it. The particulars of my cultural background made this feel like crossing a long-standing threshold, something that deserved an acknowledgment like this. With that now accomplished, I hope that a mindful and conservatively paced use of cannabis might nudge me towards a richer life, perhaps with more interesting things than the drug itself to write about.

I finished Cobalt Core in June, around six months and 45 play-hours after starting it. Over the weekend I discovered, while checking out a newly added play mode, that you can replay the endgame sequence any time you like. So I did, and I cried at least as much on my second visit as I did on my first.

Cobalt Core is one of my all-time favorite solitaire videogame experiences. I’m not sure it’s a great game; mechanically, it’s just a variant of the undeniably great Slay the Spire. But I have found it a much more welcoming game, combining a more accessible Spire-like ruleset with an attitude that is brightly wry, slightly melancholy, and a little wounded. Which, you know, resonates.

I stuck with Slay the Spire for as long as I did, years ago, because its design is so brilliantly original—and not because of its unrelenting difficulty. Spire is a game that actively resists your success, pressing you with a weight which you start to feel on the second battle of the first level if you play out your deck with anything less than perfect efficiency. Subsequent battles force your deck further and further out of balance as enemies grind you down with successively stronger attacks and curses, outpacing your ability to recover between battles. Every fight feels more and more painful, every victory scraped raw from the serrated teeth of defeat, until finally all my numbers zero out and I can bleed no more.

I mean, it’s fun! It’s a great game. It just doesn’t want you to win very often, is all. And that’s okay, that’s part of the fun! I have only “won” Spire once, somehow reaching the end of the run with only one of the three main characters. That was pre-pandemic, so I had plenty of time to try to repeat the feat, and I have long since had to content myself with considering this meager triumph as much of a victory as I’ll ever get from that game.

Cobalt Core does not have this attitude. It is a much easier game, even on its hardest difficulty settings, once you get the hang of it. With its emphasis on positional combat, the key to success is to completely dodge or block all enemy attacks, usually with no loss of health or other ill effects.

Your ship only ever has a handful of hit points, compared to the dozens-to-hundreds of HP that a Slay the Spire character has. Cobalt Core enemies want to do just as many nasty things to you as Spire baddies do—and they can actually nail you a lot faster, if you let them. But right from the start you can gaily dance your ship around almost all enemy attacks, so long as you pay attention, earn a bit of familiarity with the different characters’ decks, and practice a modicum of patience. The final battle of every winning run is tough, but beatable, feeling more like a dangerous bomb to carefully defuse than a malevolent enemy who wants you dead as quickly as possible.

And that right there is what I wanted from Slay the Spire all along, it turns out: I wanted its amazing, genre-defining design paired with a play-style whose challenge is closer in intensity to a crossword puzzle than a chess tournament. Coblat Core knows it’s easier, too, putting its ultimate victory condition behind 18 successful runs, versus the handful that Spire asks of you. I got there in 33 tries, which feels like the right win/loss ratio for Cobalt Core, because it is at least as interested in telling you a meaningful and moving story as it is in giving you a deck-building challenge. (Slay the Spire has a story insofar as any questions about the characters’ motivation and purpose are answered by the game’s title.)

And that I cried at its ending—twice—should tell you how well I thought it manages that! The Cobalt Core cast of characters, and their ongoing dialogue throughout every run and through all the intervening cutscenes, sparkles with so much genuine wit, charm, and surprising tenderness. The game is a funny-animal cartoon above all, and its surface-level humor is indeed fantastic, leaning into the time-loop framing with jokes that have setups and unexpected punchlines that stretch across several runs. (A certain long-payoff joke about Riggs’s boba tea is one for the ages.) And part of the brilliant comedy writing is the flashes of emotion, honesty, and pain that one glimpses beneath this veneer.

The finale of Cobalt Core recapitulates the shared trauma that the eight (or nine?) main characters have experienced over umpteen time loops of terrible violence—and for all their joking around, they do let slip now and again how utterly fucked up and mentally scarring their situation is. It gives them, together, the catharsis they all want so badly. After six months and dozens of runs with them, I wanted it so badly for them, too. The game ends with an act of long-denied unity even as the characters commit an unfathomable shattering, and it is perfect.

Great game.

A handful of games in my Steam library don’t work with the Steam Deck default controller settings when I use a third-party, Bluetooth-based controller, such as PlayStation 4 controller. Specifically, using the controller’s D-pad or left analog stick to navigate a list of menu options within one of these games results in the game highlighting every other option, as if every D-pad press moves the selection by two items instead of the expected one item. In addition, some buttons on the controller might not function at all.

I believe that this happens when a game’s built-in controller support conflicts with Steam Input, the controller-support service that SteamOS applies by default to Steam Deck games. You can try to mitigate this conflict by disabling Steam Input for each affected game:

1. Connect the Bluetooth controller that you want to use with the game. When following the rest of these steps, use that controller, and not the Steam Deck’s built-in controller hardware.

2. From the Steam Deck home screen, click the game that you want to apply this fix to. The game’s detail screen opens.

3. Click the 🎮 (Controller-icon) button. The Controller Settings screen opens.

4. Click the ⚙️ (Gear-icon) button. The Layout Options pane appears.

5. Click Disable Steam Input.

6. Click Confirm.

7. Navigate back to the game detail screen.

8. To see if the controller works better now, click Play. Wait for the game to load, and then try to use its main menu normally.

If you ever want to revert to using Steam Input with this game, repeat the first two steps and then click Enable Steam Input.

I have successfully applied this fix to Luck be a Landlord and Slay the Princess, and I fully expect that it works with many other games. My thanks go out to Steam users AnguzBeef and Volks for their Steam Community posts that helped me investigate and confirm this solution.

Or: How I became the focus of a mass ritual against generative AI, and what I did about it.

I have resigned from Google. I plan to return to the world of open-source projects, for now. After three years of grinding away at the cutting edge of cloud services documentation, I feel the call to help tend to the world’s slow, stable technologies instead.

My time at Google, in retrospect, was like a full graduate-degree course in technical writing and teamwork. I will treasure the skills and the professional relationships I developed there for the rest of my life. Part of me wishes I could have stayed longer, but I know that moving on is my best path today.

Every major transition like this involves both external incentives that pull you to a new place, and internal factors encouraging an exit from your current location. As for my reasons in the latter category, I only gesture to how Google itself has adjusted its goals and attitudes quite publicly in the three years since I joined, making it feel like a different employer than the one I interviewed at. I don’t fault Google for trimming its sails—life is change, for both individuals and organizations. Inevitably, the growing tensions between my values and the company’s became large enough to make my third anniversary seem like a natural Graduation Day, and so that’s how I met it.

Embarking upon these transitions often requires a shift in perspective, as well. Sometimes these come about through a trigger, such as a surprise encounter that shocks you into a new realization. This happened to me, at the end of May, and I can tell you that story.

A theatre-loving friend insisted that I see the show Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, a one-woman performance by the self-described clown Julia Masli. My friend instructed me to avoid reading about the show before attending it, and so that is what I did.

As I chose my seats while buying tickets, I noted with curiosity how most people chose seats as far back in the theater as possible, except for a smaller crowd who purchased seats right up against the stage. The middle rows were oddly empty, especially along the center aisle. I shrugged and chose a center seat in the fourth row. This was because I didn’t know what would happen if I did.

The gist of the show is that, after a tone-setting introduction that mixes meditative chanting with sudden furniture-wrecking violence, Masli asks audience members to name their problems, so that she can improvise solutions for them. Problems on the night I attended included worry over homelessness in Los Angeles, grief over a lost friend, anger about the conflict in Gaza, weariness from raising three children, and a tummy ache.

Masli responded creatively in every case, sometimes with small gestures. She instructed the tummy-ache person’s friend to put her hand on his tummy, because caring touch can feel good. Does he feel better now? Yes? Problem solved.

After the grieving person said that her fondest memory of her friend was smoking together behind their high school, Masli paired her up with another audience member who had cigarettes and directed them to share a smoke outside the theater, remembering the lost friend. Masli followed them out with her wireless mic, and we listened through the theater’s speakers as the woman, out on the sidewalk, laughed how she hadn’t smoked since high school.

A few solutions later, inevitably, Masli approached me as I sat squarely in the target area. “Problem?” she asked in a smiling sing-song: Prob-leeeeem?

I smiled. “Can’t complain.”

“Oh… yes you can. Here, tonight.” Masli is Estonian with what I would call a Russian-accented voice, and her clown persona spoke in a slow, deliberate cadence on top of that.

Amy, who had read up on the show and therefore knew precisely what we were in for, sat beside me. I turned to her. “What’s my complaint?”

Amy and I are married to each other so a lot of our complaints are about our jobs. So this is how she answered, as succinctly as possible: “AI?”

Masli immediately drew back, looking horrified.

“Sure, we can start there,” I said.

“Oh, AI. That’s very scary,” Masli said. “Very frightening. I am worried I may lose my job to it. Are you worried you may lose your job to AI?”

“No, I am worried it might make my job much worse.”

“Oh. What is your job?”

And there was only one possible answer to this, right? It came to mind immediately, but I waited a beat before saying it:

“AI.”

I gazed at the performer placidly while we both paused to let the whole theater respond to this. It was a beautiful moment.

Eventually: “And you have moral difficulties with this, yes?”

I looked pained. I worked my jaw. I started to say “We can start there” as a weak callback joke, but Masli, the actual artist here, had already taken control back: “All right. Tonight, you shall be… the symbol of evil. We are all capable of evil! But you will symbolize it now tonight. OK.” And she carried on to the next problem-haver.

Some problems Masli solved by producing props from the wings, sometimes surprisingly large ones. The tired mother got a full-sized lounge chair, a sleeping mask, and noise-canceling earphones. The Gaza conversation resulted in the name of a Gaza children’s charity written on a back wall in fluorescent marker while another audience member symbolically repaired the chair that Masli had destroyed in a screaming fit at the start of the show.

And then Masli found an opportunity to speak about the importance of washing away our collective evils together, as she walked back towards my seat and held out her hand, beckoning me to join her on the stage. I watched along with the seated audience as she pulled a curtain aside to reveal a full-sized shower stall. I did my best to respond with a silent pose of grim acceptance. She then directed me to prepare myself, backstage.

Masli’s assistant greeted me as I entered a backstage wing, led me up some stairs, and assigned me costuming and blocking instructions for the rest of the show. Shorts approximately matching my skin tone had already been laid out. I was to change into them, then wrap myself in a white towel and a robe, both of which I’d flip up onto the frosted stall door after entering. “That way it’ll look like you’re naked. It’s a gag.”

I changed, descended the stairs, and re-entered the stage barefoot and dressed for the bath while Masli worked through another chaotic solution. The audience vocally expressed its surprise and delight. I took a seat on an upstage chair to watch the performer complete her work, even though I couldn’t see very well because I had left my glasses upstairs. She was collecting socks from the audience, to burn them in a bucket; I admit that I never learned what the problem was, here. With all that completed, Masli directed me through gesture and spotlight to enter the stall. Dance music commenced as soon as I turned the water on, and I threw my hands up and bopped like I was on a crowded club floor. So did everyone else that I could see.

And the guy finished his chair, and everyone had a good time. Amy took the photograph accompanying this article, capturing the moment. You can just make out my hands reaching over the shower stall as I hyped up the chair guy. The seated woman in the photo was using the computer to order some plane tickets for Berlin on Masli’s instructions, if I recall correctly.

And the next day, a Friday, I showed up to work as usual. By lunchtime I felt strangely sick. By the end of the day, I had an inkling as to why. I wrote up a summary of the evening’s events and shared it with several friends. One who knows a thing or two about modern-day magick said: “Okay, actually, yes, that is absolutely a ritual.” I had stripped (pretend) naked before an audience of hundreds, and had all their attention on me as I engaged in act of overtly symbolic ablution of a named “evil”, because outside of the bounds of the ritual space I was an active and direct participant in the thing that was named.

And what could I do then? One of two things, really. I could reject the experience, swallow the tension that the event had put in my heart, let all of that energy dissipate and go to ground. It would take a while and I’d feel soul-sick the whole time, but I could do it. Perhaps I’d emerge with a fiery and renewed will to succeed at my work for my employer.

Or, I could accept the absurd and oblique energy of that evening as a gift, something truly unexpected that happens maybe once in a lifetime if you’re lucky, and let it transform me. The acceptance would require reciprocation, an action that would complete the circuit and reify the focus. I would need to do something to shift myself from a passive receptacle of one audience’s one-time attention to an active and ongoing conduit, a person choosing to adjust their stance to make the world a little less bad.

And I chose what I chose, and I feel pretty good about it.

Played and enjoyed Unpacking, an interestingly minimalist narrative game released by Witch Beam in 2021. It tracks twenty years in the life of a young woman as she works through various trials and tribulations to land finally at career success and family fulfillment. The genius of it lay in how you experience her story: every level of the game represents one of many successive moves into new homes—starting with her first by-herself bedroom, as a young teenager. You learn about the progression of her life at every stage by unpacking all of her possessions from cardboard boxes, one at a time, and deciding where each one goes. And that’s it! You don’t see anyone, much less talk to anyone—you never even directly see the main character. All you get is her stuff, with every book, toothbrush, and chipped coffee mug rendered in wonderfully chunky pixel art.

The act of putting things away encourages you reflect on every item, and what it means for its owner. You can’t help but track subtle changes in her wardrobe over the years, and you note which silly tchotchkes from her college days she discards quickly and which she carries into her thirties, move after move. You watch as she gradually finds her focus, with more of her possessions bending towards a passion for making art—with a side order of healthy fandom. Just noting things like this makes up ninety percent of the game, and it works, even though there’s no boss-battle challenges where you must apply what you’ve learned about the character’s life in a race against time, or something. You just put more of her socks away, at your own pace.

The other ten percent happens during surprising moments of storytelling that emerge from occasional, carefully orchestrated difficulties encountered in placing objects. Oh, the heartbreak you feel when you realize that the tiny city apartment she’s moved into is too small—and too crowded with its current occupant’s belongings—to let her framed diploma fit anywhere other than under their bed. There are a couple of moments like that in her future, even subtler, and unforgettable.

In fact, it did take me a long time to understand that stuff already on the shelves and tabletops at the the start of a level were things that belonged to people she was moving in with, whether roommates or romantic partners. In every case, I vaguely thought that we joined the unpacking in medias res, for some reason, and that the main character’s interests over the years flitted from dressmaking to electric guitars and then back to drawing again. I mean she’s young, right? One tries out all kinds of stuff at that age. I figured it out in retrospect by the time the game inverts this pattern, with good reason.

Unpacking also helped me reflect on a particular aspect of sexuality shared by many contemporary indie games. As the story proceeded past its low point and promised new beginnings for the unseen hero, I felt positive that she’d end up with another woman, and: ah, wouldn’t you know it. The thing is, if she had ended the story paired with a man, the whole work would seem discordant, though not for any reason explicitly present in the text. Queerness has, I think, become a kind of genre expectation for short, interesting narrative games. The unnamed family that we briefly glimpse in the finale of Unpacking are the latest gay bildungsroman characters I’ve enjoyed accompanying for a few hours, a lineage I can trace back at least as far as the kids in Night in the Woods or Gone Home.

I actually have difficulty thinking of a center-stage heterosexual couple from any recent higher-profile indie game I’ve played in the last several years; the only ones who come to mind are Sam and Lydia from Paradise Killer. (And that’s overlooking the fact that Sam is a skeleton. But if Lydia can live with that, so can I.) I hypothesize that because heterosexuality remains the default in the larger popular culture, small-studio game creators feel encouraged to explore different directions when it comes to representing romance in their work.

Anyway, Unapcking is a great game. I can recommend it to anyone.