Mods are asleep, post desktops.
I finished reading The Bird King by G. Willow Wilson. It’s a sometimes harrowing adventure story about searching for peace and home, and while it wasn’t written specifically for this time we’re in, it has passages that hit home in the moment we’re navigating. The more I look at the things I highlighted, the more the through-lines of hope, finding who you are, and the power of truths shine out.
On happiness and struggle, a character says,
“Let me tell you something important. The real struggle on this earth is not between those who want peace and those who want war. It’s between those who want peace and those who want justice. If justice is what you want, then you may often be right, but you will rarely be happy.”
And on survival:
Her breath would come only in gasps, long stuttering things that burned her throat, but she took them, one after another, agreeing with each one to live a while longer.
I’m really grateful for this lovely and evocative novel.
This sea of people at Seattle’s Hands-Off rally yesterday was an energizing affirmation. Even after moving much closer to the front, I could still barely hear anything coming from the stage, but the energy and happiness of the crowd — to unify and to recognize in one another the hope we require — was just what I needed.
Playing a lot of Lonely Mountains Snow Riders this weekend. I really enjoyed its mountain-biking predecessor, and this version – on skis – is a treat. It adds a chaotic, fun multiplayer racing mode that gave me a surprisingly great co-op game last night, in which an opponent would zip ahead of me, then pause and turn to watch me descend to their location, emoting cheerful hearts and thumbs-ups.
When I yard-saled myself off a rock or into the river, which happened a lot on one of the maps we raced, they patiently waited, cheering me on, occasionally falling off their own skis so that we respawned together at the same checkpoint starting line to try the pitch again. When I finally found the right line, we glided together down the rest of the route, angling around long curves and dipping through a field of bumps before crossing the finish line to our camp. It was like skiing with a coach, or, sometimes, like skiing with my dad; and it reminded me of the surprise co-op session of Ashen that I played last fall, and was, 100%, the most wholesome and warm and encouraging game experience I’ve had in a long time.
Sometimes games are really good, gang.
One year ago, we were on an exploratory trip to the place that’s now our home. I’m glad we’re here.
We’ve received lots of rain this weekend, giving the newly-blooming trees a good soak.
I miss the days when I had a bunch of pals hanging out on Flickr.
I am so looking forward to this game: Cairn is a realistic-ish climbing game with a layer of survival and resource management mechanics, and it feels really good to play, right down to the calming breath from a bomber hold to the Elvis-leg twitching you get from holding too long on a sketchy, fatigued toe edge.
After a hard pitch, you can roll out your little bivvy sack, cook some instant noodles with your ultralight stove, and sleep with a view of the stars. It’s delightful and a perfect depiction of dirtbag climber downtime.
You have to manage food, water, and consumables like climbing chalk that give you a temporary boost, and at one point in the demo I had to rappel all the way down several crags to fill my water bottles and spend my meager few coins on a packet of fruit chews – I just hoped it would fill my energy meter enough to get back to, and then finish, the final long pitch of the climb. I had barely enough food energy to make it to the top, and when I finally topped out, doubled over from the effort, exhaustion and hunger, it felt like an amazing triumph.
I knew this game sounded familiar, and I found Riley MacLeod’s great writeup of the demo from a couple months back, which I’m sure I read at the time. The demo now has a mode that lets the player somewhat-gracefully select the limb to move, which I found I needed when I got myself into tricky, awkward positions on the wall. This game looks like something special and I can’t wait for its full release to see how it handles things like expedition-length trips – route finding for resupply drops, heck yes! – and what it does with the hints of story found in the demo.
