crushed by a redwood tree in the middle of a baseball game in an act of anti-labor violence

a review of Thomas Pynchon’s VINELAND

(8/31/25 - 9/1/25)

Where to begin. Well, I’m writing a book review. At the beginning of this year (2025) I finally went through the trouble of updating the hosting on this blog, and began moving some of the very few pieces I’d written since college onto the new version. I’ve since started going through and reposting the stuff I did for The Collegian (and probably will continue to work on that throughout the fall), but I also wanted to get back in the habit of writing a little bit more about the things I read/watch/etc. I really really enjoy doing the podcast with Quinn, and he keeps encouraging me to do more Mattaining Balance stuff (which would kind of hit the same “critical writing on art” part of my brain that has felt so dormant for so long), but I also just have this kind of romantic idea that I can fall backwards into restarting the sort of “once-a-week late at night 800 word media-thoughts” machine that I had built during my 18 months writing at the paper. It’s been too long since I’ve actually written, and I kind of hate using Letterboxed, so I’m going to make myself do this instead.

Anyways. At the end of July, Emily and I went to the mall so I could buy a few new pairs of shorts, because it had been at least 5 years since I’d done so, and stuff was on sale with school starting here in Chattanooga. We parked (as we always do) outside the Barnes and Noble, and took a quick loop around the sales tables on our way to the rest of the mall. At a stack labeled “DYSTOPIAS” one book jumped out at me - Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. I recognized it because I’d recently learned that it was going to be the basis of the new Paul Thomas Anderson film, One Battle After Another. This was (and is) a film I’m very much looking forward to, and Pynchon has always been one of those “important” modern American novelists that I’ve been meaning to read since about high school, when in my 2012-2013 junior year “Honors Literature” class, we read three books about how to read books by Thomas C. Foster where he repeatedly talked about The Crying of Lot 49. My vague memory of what he said (other than it being about stamps) was how great it was as an example for understanding all sorts of modern and post-modern literary devices, and the cartoonish absurdity of the world we live in. Those Foster books loom large over the way my critical apparatus works - but my guess is that if I returned to them now I’d find them incredibly clunky and unhelpful. I don’t really know a whole lot about TVTropes, but from what I have learned, I think probably Professor Foster kinda just also invented TVTropes in book form around the same time that website was launching. A real Newton-Leibniz situation.

Ok. So. I bought the book, it took me about 3ish weeks of one-or-two weeknights of readings to get through, and for about half of that time I was just intensely frustrated. This review is - in part - an attempt to work through that frustration, because I think this book is good! I also just kind of hold to this sort of protestant work ethic idea that something that was difficult to do must be worthwhile and important, or at least interesting to talk about. I’m working through that, but putting my thoughts to paper here feels like finishing the work, and closing the loop - so let’s get to it.

Plot summary first - Vineland is a novel that tells the story of aging hippie Zoyd Wheeler and his teenage daughter Prairie. When the book opens, it’s 1984 and the two of them are living in Vineland, a small town on the densely wooded and thematically foggy North California coast. Vineland has become a sort of last stop and magnet for surfers and burnouts to park their trailers and set up roots while fleeing the rapidly Reaganifying core of California. Strip malls are popping up, the forests are being logged, and new investment capital is rolling in to clean up the biker bars and drag everyone into the bright new financialized future of trickle-down-economics. Oh, and everyone is glued to the Tube. During Zoyd’s annually televised big public mental-health spectacle designed to illustrate that he is still unable to work - thus keeping him and Prairie on government benefits - Zoyd is contacted by DEA agent Hector Zuñiga, a guy who spent most of the 60s unsuccessfully trying to get Zoyd to rat on whoever was selling him weed. Hector lets Zoyd know that a scary figure from their past - federal prosecutor Brock Vond - is on his way to Vineland to round up Zoyd and Prairie, and take them into custody for something related to Zoyd’s long disappeared ex-wife - Prairie’s mother - Frenesi Gates. Brock soon arrives with an army in tow, blows up the Wheeler house, and scares away their dog. Zoyd scrambles to get out of town, sending Prairie off in the other direction to hide out with her boyfriend’s crappy punk band until they can all figure out what’s going on.

We spend maybe a chapter or two with Zoyd, sadly reminiscing on his limited understanding of who Frenesi was (some sort of radical filmmaker?), and getting some really good pining after a lost love, mixed with a quick short story about being a keyboard player on a Hawaiian themed novelty airline that was regularly attacked by sky pirates. The narrative then shifts to Prairie’s perspective: she’s quickly picked up by a sexy lady ninja named Daryl Louise (DL), one of her mother’s old friends from radical film collective 24fps. DL takes Prairie step by step through a long and complicated history of who her mother really was, and why Brock Vond is back now, complete with some screenings of the POV footage Frenesi shot during a doomed student uprising at the Trasero County College of the Surf. Frenesi’s story is intercut with some extremely tedious side stories about DL’s time training to become the angstiest and sexiest lady ninja you’ve ever heard of, her encounters with a Japanese insurance businessman named Takeshi, and their eventual partnership to form a karmic adjustment agency for confused ghosts called “thanatoids” that are trapped in a town in the woods not far from Zoyd and Prairie’s home in Vineland.

What we learn about Frenesi is this: a sucker for a man in uniform - she fell in love with Vond, a constant oppositional fixture at the sort of actions against the state that 24fps documented and participated in. Vond used Frenesi to undermine and topple the student movement at the College of the Surf, which imploded when Frenesi provided a gun that was used to kill the movement’s charismatic leader/messiah-figure. Vond - now obsessed with Frenesi - took her into custody in a top-secret concentration camp squirreled away in one of the secret empty parts of central California where she remained - perhaps willingly - until DL rescued her. Frenesi stumbled into Zoyd somewhere around San Diego, and the two engaged in a loving but shallow marriage, with Frenesi always pining away after Vond. After Prairie’s birth, Vond rounded the young family up, and allowed Zoyd to leave with his daughter, with the understanding that Frenesi would go with Brock, and he would keep Zoyd and Prairie under surveillance to ensure they made no attempt to find her. Frenesi’s mother Sasha suggests that they move up to Vineland, an old Gates family camping spot that Frenesi was always drawn to. Maybe someday she’ll cycle back around, and the two of them could be there waiting for her.

And now we’re back in the present. A few years of aggressive public budget cuts and privatization have meant the end of a bunch of federal government programs. All of the funding for Brock’s toys and guns and informants is being taken away, and everything’s going back to the way it was. Everyone is converging on Vineland. Prairie finds her way back to Zoyd at this year’s annual Gates Family reunion, and Frenesi re-emerges into the narrative, an object of sadness, fascination, and obsession, but not really of substance. Brock zooms in on a helicopter to try to assert his control and snatch everyone away one more time, but he’s forced to leave when he literally runs out of gas money - Reagan has deemed the whole thing an embarrassing expense. It’s time to give up on that old dream, or just become another ghost in the woods. We close on an image of Prairie, still a bit confused over this whole thing, thinking about those ghosts - who her parents were, what Brock wanted from them, and what all that could mean for her. And then - her lost dog - a spitting image of its mother - comes sauntering out of the trees.

That got away from me a little bit - but I don’t know! I feel like that’s the minimum viable product for this story. I’ve caught myself saying a few times that the plot is very simple - and I think that’s true, because not a whole lot happens - but I think so much of this book is in the complex details; the texture, the flavor, the rough edges, even the ridiculous character and place names and pop-cultural references. And those are the things I like. I like our main viewpoint characters (Zoyd and Prairie) and I like almost every single secondary character we get - because most of the time, we are introduced to them in a sort of exhaustive detail-oriented maelstrom. Vineland does this really neat thing - particularly in the first chapters about Frenesi - where in addition to personal backstory, we telescope out and get genealogical history. Sure, Frenesi is a flowery California hippie with a romantic conception of the power of truth and film, but her parents - Sasha and Hub - were blacklisted pinko Hollywood script doctors and gaffers with romantic ideas about the good that even compromised unions could do. And Sasha’s parents were dyed in the wool red-blooded International Workers of the World aligned loggers: wobblies with romantic ideas about actual physical Labor violence with a capital L. Throw some grenades at Pinkertons, get your legs crushed by a falling redwood tree during the middle of a baseball game. Happy Labor Day. Everyone and everything and every tree in the forest comes from somewhere, and Vineland gives us this sort of long-term cross-section of what it means/meant to be leftist in California, and how that got diluted and carved out over time. And that’s just in one character backstory! We get this sort of thing in all of them!

This is a generational epic about ideological purity, and it’s a California novel - which means that it’s also about music, and movies, and TV and what they’re all doing to us. (The book does not think that the things they are doing are good! Especially TV!) I think that with that framing in mind, it has a lot of good ideas that often get caught in the sort of neon-flashing maximalist language that Pynchon uses, with constant references to specific shows and films (complete with release years in parentheticals) and songs (sung out in full excruciating detail every time) flying at us at breakneck speed. Some of those references are strong enough in their effect, but others have unfortunately gotten too dated or convoluted to work. Near the end, in one of the highlights of the book, Frenesi gets a really affecting vision of a character’s impending death - but I nearly missed the full punch of the moment because I wasn’t immediately familiar with the oblique way in which Pynchon references the old “the worms march in/the worms march out/the worms play pinochle on your snout” bit. There’s a whole fan-wiki that exists to explain every reference made on every page of this book. To me, that indicates a pretty massive failure on the part of the work. This is a book that’s clever more than it is smart, a book that’s silly more than it is funny, and that works against it at every turn. It feels like watching a dramatic film that’s constantly cutting to TikToks of a guy doing more and more complicated backflips. Sure it’s a cool trick, but what’s the point? Why did we spend one-hundred-and-ten full pages on the bit about the sexy lady ninja? I get the sense from the little bit of review reading that I’ve done that this is one of the less popular Pynchon books, so I’m probably just preaching to the choir with all this criticism, but I had to fight through large portions of the middle just to get back to the interesting bits, and the book wasn’t even that long!

Ok. Almost there. Let’s do one more paragraph on stuff I liked. I can immediately see why PTA chose to adapt this book, even loosely. There are so many little specific details and turns of phrase building out this world that I just find absolutely charming. I clung to every second that we spent with Zoyd in crappy bars, watching weird local commercials for BDSM tinted lawncare companies and Buddhist themed pizza places. I wish there was more of that kind of stuff and less of some of the others! I know there’s no accounting for taste, but I just really despised the sexy lady ninja stuff. Another thing I loved - the thanatoids: this idea of a specifically yuppie California flavor of ghost so apathetic about death that it just kind of seems unable to cling to them. There’s some really wonderful description around the town - I think called Shade Canyon - where they all live, about the way light can’t quite hit all the shadows cast by its weird trees and buildings; things just kind of get lost there. It’s good!

Last big point in Vineland’s favor: Brock Vond. What a good villain! I love that characters are just constantly referring to him as “the prosecutor.” It’s a big move to have a character that you can just blame all of Nixon-era COINTELPRO and then Reagan-era War on Drugs on, but it works! All of the evil of the federal government swirls around this one weird little guy, who is simultaneously sex-obsessed and repulsed, and helplessly infatuated with the type of person he claims to hate. A big bad authority figure who refers to the activists of the hippie movement as misguided children, but is himself a lost boy searching for approval in an arbitrary and bureaucratic system that doesn’t even consider him. I’ve complained already that a lot of the stuff in this book is pretty dated, but I think Brock’s whole deal - especially his interest in phrenology and deep consideration of things like “the criminal face” is so forward looking. Alt-Right guys on Twitter today are just doing this bit unironically! They love phrenology!

The ways in which this story still feels relevant stack up in every fed character and plotline we get. Aside from Brock, we’re treated via Hector to the type of mean and stupid federal agent constantly self-mythologizing their own heroism through the language of film and TV - which I find particularly resonant when our current Secretary of Homeland Security is doing everything she can to make her war on immigrants into reality TV. There’s a lot of good stuff in this book about top secret concentration camps that the US government is explicitly using to disappear citizens that they consider to be enemies of the state. There are some really incredible paragraphs about the secret and sinister back offices from which psy-ops and mind poison (physical, mental, and dental) spring upon our main characters, and one really great sentence about a just-out-of-sight third highway that runs somehow directly parallel to all known roads, and leads straight into those right-in-plain-view compounds, surrounded by barbed wire, just waiting to be filled. Pynchon does an excellent job of laying the tracks from the US moves against foreign communist enemies in the Red Scare and the Cold War, to the inevitable way that these tactics would be turned towards its own - either in a prefiguration of further action abroad, or as a perfected strategy finally ready for use at home in the war on communism, terrorism, drugs, whatever. Zoyd thinks more than once - grimly - about how whenever it’s time for the marijuana to be harvested, the Pacific Northwest becomes just another enemy country under the full assault of America’s military machinery. Good!!!

Anyways. I missed some fascinating stuff about the computer, and about this book’s really kind of regressive and slut-shamey views about what I’d describe as “the treachery of women.” I don’t know how much of that is par for the course for Pynchon, and/if how much of it will show up elsewhere - but it felt significant enough to note here, even if I didn’t get into it fully. (I’ll probably read The Crying of Lot 49 soon - I found a used copy up in Chicago last week.) I think that just about wraps up my thoughts on this book - so I’ll close out here, Vineland is a 3 out of 5 star book, and I bet that movie is gonna be good. Thank you for reading all the way to the end, have a good one. Matt out.

The Steam Bathed Evil

Statistics, Slug, Save for “Charm Person,” and Sauna

Being a play report of a brief campaign comprised of four sessions of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons played October 6th, October 13th, October 20th, and November 3rd, 2021, written shortly thereafter, and finally published today, Sunday, June 29th, 2025

What is an RPG?

Just kidding.

A few weeks ago, we spent some time talking about early editions of Dungeons and Dragons in the basement of the Brain Trust discord. We dove into what those games were designed to do, different flash games they inspired, and just how great the “history of editions of dungeons and dragons” flowchart on Wikipedia is. After that, Will Jobst reached out to me to see if I wanted to embark on an archaeological expedition into one of those early versions - Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, 1st Edition (1978). I knew Will and a few others had really enjoyed their time doing something similar last year with Gamma World - another early role-playing game (think Fallout) - so I was really excited to be invited along on this experiment. Plus, I still have that cultural idea from things like Stranger Things and Community and pre “The Adventure Zone” and “Critical Role” actual-play podcasts that there’s something special about early versions of Dungeons and Dragons that I’d just been missing out on for all these years. I was determined to capture that magic, catalog what made it different from the immediately preceding and following versions, and see if I could imagine the full length of the arc that would eventually bring the game to 5e - Dungeons and Dragons, 5th Edition (2014) - a game that I’ve struggled against every time I’ve played it (but we’ll get to that later). So, I bought a 3 ring binder and a set of cool orange dice, found some PDFs, printed off the ADND Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide, and did my best to dive right in.

Our guiding principle in this whole adventure was to play the whole thing as if we were a group in a basement in 1978. We wanted to do our best to play rules as written, with all of the applicable rules. Here’s how it went.

Session 1 - Making a Character

• We spent two hours rolling characters. It was a lot more complicated than we anticipated.
• We each rolled 4 sets of 6 dice each, in order for stats.
• I went with my raw stats, Will juiced theirs a little bit to play as a paladin
• We spent a lot of time cross referencing the stats pages with our class descriptions - there’s a lot of weird restrictions that are in place about what you can and can’t do, and for no real mechanical reason, it’s more the fictional logic that’s involved in the background
• I was unable to figure out how spell slots worked
• John let us know that 1e doesn’t have skill checks, there’s just some bonuses and like, “facts” associated with your skill scores, like having the ability to lift a door or bend bars if you’re real strong
• I ended up with only 2 hit points which felt dangerously low
• We spent some time buying equipment and setting proficiencies and learning how THAC0 worked (still a little unclear)
• I did the thing where you go through the spell list for your class and roll the percentile dice to see if you’re capable of learning a spell - big fan of this method of building a spell book
• John told us some more about the setting, from the Jamboard they’d put together - lots of medieval Russian paintings, implied cold and holiness and stuff
• We went through a series of questions to build out the world and our backstories - will’s paladin Nikita had been on a crusade, and lost their religion but was now on a quest for their friend, a Joan of Arc type figure, to find and collect the pieces of their God’s icon from within a bunch of scattered altars
• My character, elf, was an elf with an unpronounceable name from the desert, but not from the desert. Elves aren’t from here, and maybe slipped through a crack in the world. They live in a dome where they’ve painted out the moon, and some of that has leaked out into the bits of the world around the crack. Elves are atheists, which is an interesting choice in a world and setting where the gods walk among us, but at the same time is the reason for this belief

Session 2 - Entering the dungeon

• Adam joined us this week, they wanted to be a fighter, so we spent a little bit of time finding some generators to spit them out a character - all of them are wild and incomprehensible
• Adam’s character Audrey was from the same church that Nikita had left, they’d run away from home to hunt mushrooms in a dungeon
• John gave us a beautiful opening narration about how sad and scary and alone the opening to this dungeon was, and then we spent a while trying to figure out the safest way to go in
• I made sure to pack torches and the other like, OSR items I always hear about (spikes, 10 foot pole, rope)
• The theme of the dungeon was kinda sorta like slime and steam? It was all wet and warm
• First room, we ran into some shriekers, and they didn’t fight, but they screamed and were drawing in more monsters
• Nikita did detect evil and got nothing, so I felt a little conflicted about it, but we blasted them to charred bits and moved on
• In the next room we ran into a giant slug that was coming to eat the shriekers, and was blocking the passage further into the dungeon
• The fight started, and my plan was to just kinda hang back and try to blast it from a safe distance
• Nikita and Audrey took turns blasting the slug and I hit it with magic missile and burning hands, making sure to read the spell descriptions carefully, in the spirit of the game
• I got a little too excited and tried to killing blow the slug with my staff, and it spit acid on me for 6 points of damage, reducing me to -4
• Nikita and Audrey killed the slug and we ended the session

(From Will)

Session 3 - The Funeral Boat and the Nymph

• Adam was gone this week, so we spent some time reading the death rules, and figured out that elf wasn’t dead, just real hurt
• Gary said it would be a few weeks for characters to recover from that, so we did a timeskip to account for getting out of the dungeon and healing up, and then went through the XP process from the shriekers and slug fights, which let us each level up once
• I realized I was doing spell slots wrong - at first level you can only memorize ONE spell. You start off so so so weak in this game, which is still kinda the case in 5e, but for some reason, it feels more acceptable here? Like when I play 5e I level skip to at least 5th level so I’ll have stuff to do, that seems unimaginable here, and I think that’s because the progression ramp is shorter and less detailed
• We went back into the dungeon and came to a flooded room with a boat with a grim reaper figure head, a mummified corpse of a noblewoman, and a glass bowl with two small hunting dogs inside
• We roped the boat in and climbed in respectfully and rowed around for a bit, until we found a flooded room that had been set up with treasure to almost resemble a beach. A nymph sat on top of some of the treasure. Elf tried singing at it, but it was unamused. It did seem interested in Nikita.
• Suddenly, 3 nyxies appeared. John said he picked these because they were low level and water themed. Reading the stat block, he told us that they like to enslave humans, which all made us laugh nervously. Their strategy is to cast “charm person” and “breathe underwater” on someone, and then carry them away - for at least a YEAR. Of course, Nikita was instantly blasted.
• I looked up the rules for saving against charm person, and we found out Nikita’s first chance to save wouldn’t come for a full calendar month.
• I got to work blasting magic missile, and was able to conk one of the nyxies on the head as they were carting Nikita off, and that broke the trance.
• The nymph was impressed with us, and opened a dimension door into a deeper less dangerous part of the dungeon.
• We went through and found a dirty room full of treasure, and a domoboy, a Russian house spirit that dislikes messy rooms. (John used the stat block of a leprechaun.) It grabbed a spell scroll I wanted and turned invisible, so I threw oil on it to keep track of it, inadvertently making it super slippery. We chased it around until it gave up, and we got a ton of gold and platinum pieces, which through the gold for XP rule helped us level up 2 more times.
• John mentioned that we also got some jewels, and I got excited because I’d seen the tables and rules for identifying gems, which had seemed super boring when I skimmed past them, but having a reason to actually use them seemed like a blast. We spent maybe 20 minutes assigning treasure through random tables, and I immediately got the appeal.

Session 4 - The Sauna

• Adam rejoined us for this session, and we helped them level up
• We spent some time figuring out the weight of the treasure, and then I cast “floating disc” to help us carry most of it around. John had told us not to use the given names for spell’s like “tenser’s floating disc,” so i decided it was called “Skumin’s floating disc” after a modern Russian philosopher - Victor Skumin

(Victor Skumin)

• We came across a hallway that forked into almost two bracket shaped ( [ ] ) passages on either end of a big steamy room. The doors were moldy and rotten and swollen, and steam poured out from underneath their cracks. Nikita and Audrey took turns trying to wrench the door open, and when they finally got it, an Ettin - a giant 2 headed monster, one side big and strong, one a little smaller - stumbled out of the sauna. Nikita’s “detect evil” senses started going crazy

(From Adam)

• I immediately ran around the corner to try to get into the opposite “bracket” hallway and kick down that door to do a hit from the back
• Audrey scored a really good big crit on the ettin, and then it proceeded to smack the two of them around for a little bit
• Elf got to the door and tried unsuccessfully to pull it open, and thenunfurled the scroll, and did a split second action to attempt to learn “knock” from it. It succeeded and they blasted the door open.
• The fight continued between Nikita and Audrey and the Ettin, and then Elf collected some stinking items from the ruined sauna, and cast “stinking cloud” at the Ettin, wholly and completely incapacitating it. We then took turns hitting it and blasting it with magic missile until it died, which felt really mean
• We got a ton of treasure from this one, and went though the same process of rolling to determine what it was
• We spent some time debriefing, Adam remarked this was maybe the least they’d read any rules and that they thought any game we played in this group would be fun, Will agreed and said they were glad we played but didn’t ever want to play this again, John was happy to do the math and make an adventure for us, and remembered some of the joys of this kind of play, but agreed on the not liking this style of game. I said I found a lot of the same frustrations I have with 5e (waiting for your turn and feeling like your options are limited but somehow still wasted) but also I liked the structure and weird huge ruleset, and how getting to play rules lawyer gave me some guidance/purpose and felt fun instead of confrontational. John agreed.

january 2022

Woah hey, did I write something this month? (One sentence in, and I’ve already re-captured the tone I used to do all these in, while simultaneously rolling my eyes as hard as I can at it.) Two of my resolutions for 2022 were to keep better track of the media that I consumed, and to actually sit down and do some writing about some of it. Let’s get to it.

Ranged Touch

Ranged Touch is a podcast network that I’ve been following for a while - I got into them through “Just King Things,” their ongoing podcast covering the works of Stephen King in publication order, and then really got into them with their Baldur’s Gate show “Mages and Murderdads” and their Homestuck analysis pod “Homestuck Made This World.” I recently moved, and spent most of my time packing and carrying boxes listening to their excellent monthly Patreon podcast, and I really just don’t have enough positive things to say about the whole thing. Ranged Touch is a fantastic network of podcasts that fills the void in my heart that Idle Thumbs left - there is truly nothing better than listening to a few friends making incredibly inside jokes while talking about things I am too dumb to understand, whether it’s DND computer games from the 90s, the webcomic Homestuck, the academic field of Game Studies, or Magic the Gathering. Unfortunately, I am exactly dumb enough to understand the works of Stephen King.

Peacemaker

I think this show is better than all of the Marvel shows that came out in 2021. Part of that is that I’m a big James Gunn fan, but a larger part is that I think the material here is just so much more interesting and better written, and isn’t so concerned about advancing the state of the media universe it inhabits. Also, the soundtrack is perfect, and has made me want to be a glam metal guitarist. Outside of that, I think all the performances have been really good - especially John Cena, who proves once again that he can knock comedy out of the park, while also sticking the landing on some of the more emotional stuff. Freddie Stroma, the actor who plays Vigilante, is an absolute delight - and I cannot wait to see him in more stuff. I’ve mentioned to Jarrod a few times that this feels like a different more modern take on the Joss Whedon nerd TV dramas that defined fan culture in the early 2000s - not sure if I’ve got that take fully baked yet, but I might come back to it once the show wraps. Two thumbs up till then!

Licorice Pizza

I saw this movie near the beginning of the month, and felt really strongly about it while I was watching it and immediately after - but writing about it now a lot of that passion has kinda faded. I think this is a really good movie - and like a really cute romantic comedy/drama about characters that I loved and related to, that has some depth and complications to it, but I don’t think it’ll stick with me the same way some other films of this genre have. I’d love to see it again, because it was just such a joy to watch - both leads have this sort of magnetism to them, and seeing them in both dramatic and mundane scenes, running into each other’s arms again and again and again while the music swelled - to me, that’s the absolute best that movies can be. Who knows, I may have re-convinced myself that I love this movie!

Scream (2022)

On the other hand, I have not been able to stop thinking about this movie since I saw it, and I don’t even think it’s very good. I came late to the Scream franchise, but thought it was extremely fun and smart, even 30ish years later. Scream (2022) felt like it hurt itself by trying to be all of the things the original was, and also all of the things we now understand it to be. It felt like a good movie and a bad one thrown into a blender, mixed up, and then poured out - a funny film and a serious one, a “meta” take and a conventional one - polar opposites slammed together and then parceled out; and the mishmash tone was super weird. It starts out promisingly enough, re-doing the Drew Barrymore sequence from the original, while kinda poking fun at the fact that a lot of people trip over themselves to label popular horror movies as “arty” and “smart,” rather than just good pieces of scary popcorn cinema. Unfortunately, after that I thought the “meta” discussions completely fell apart as they shifted to being about remakes and fan expectations surrounding them. I thought most of the characters were sketchy at best, and most of the kills were wholly uninteresting. The motivation of the killer was good while it was being revealed, and then immediately felt tacky as they continued to monologue. There’s one reveal near the end of this film that I realized was coming a few minutes before it happened, and I think the fact that it could do that is maybe the smartest part of the whole movie. I’m disappointed that this movie was not as good as it could have been, while simultaneously fascinated by the ways in which it was bad. You should watch it.

Yellowjackets

So far, this is my favorite piece of media from 2022. I am more than a little concerned that they’ve apparently got 5 seasons of this show mapped out, but I’ll be along for the ride. I’ve jokingly made the hot take that this show is “what if LOST was good,” but on a more serious note, I think it does a lot of the same good mystery box + character investigation drama stuff, splitting between an absolutely horrifying “survival in the woods” plotline, and a positively conventional “prestige TV midlife crisis” plotine, somehow making both of them extremely compelling through the really truly good performances it delivers, and its seemingly unique decision to make Melanie Lynskey a lightly despicable character that you can’t help but root for, rather than one that you just feel sorry for. Good show, can’t wait to see where it goes.

Wordle

Love wordle. Hate the New York Times. Enough said.

Found Another Good One, Trust Me

This piece is a follow-up to one that I wrote almost two years ago about Call of Duty - Modern Warfare (2019), a video game that I liked so much I played it almost every night for about 18 months straight. That was definitely too much time for one game, but a pandemic and a layoff and the launch of a wildly successful battle royale mode all happened in that 18 months, so I’m gonna say it was allowed.

I come to you bearing good news of great joy - Splitgate is here to announce unto us that first person shooters are fun again. Remember how good it felt to jump around in Halo 3 and knock people out of the air with the battle rifle on Guardian? Remember how much fun it was in Portal when you’d drop into a pit and then shoot across a chamber off of a rampy bit? Something something you got chocolate in my peanut butter, we’re thinking with portals and killing dudes with the oddball, from the hit Halo mode oddball.

Honestly, that’s kinda it - they combined Portal and Halo and it’s real fun and it’s free to play with crossplay! Drilling down a bit, I think one of the reasons this game got its hooks into me is that it’s so playfully audacious - it’s a kind of bold faced clone-combo of two very popular games from like 10 years ago. That is not to say that this game isn’t impressive in its own right - it super is. I can’t imagine that it was easy to get it all working, and feeling as good as it does. (The portal jumps feel perfect, the jetpack is better than the previous high water mark - Destiny 2 - the guns have the perfect amount of oomf, and rocket launcher kills feel like you’re getting away with a crime.) This game is chock full of cool maps and every possible mode you could want from an FPS, and they’re all bundled up in really streamlined casual playlists that keep you moving through all of it without feeling crushed by competition or worn out - and on top of that, the daily/weekly/seasonal battlepass challenges all feel pretty varied and achievable, which stands in stark contrast to the impossible treadmill I pretty much always run into with these sort of games. With Splitgate, there is always something new to see, and it’s always a delight.

Of course, I’m pretty bad at this game - because it’s a multiplayer first person shooter - but I think that makes the fact that I’m having as much fun with it as I am even more impressive. I was telling Ethan that I think I don’t really get too frustrated dying as much as I do because of the way that you just kinda ragdoll and respawn in the course of a few seconds. There’s none of the weight and shame that comes from killcams and bloody screens in Call of Duty, and the whacky sci-fi space marine playground decoration just makes the whole thing feel like I’m at space camp with my friends or something. (Sidenote - this game has a really slick look, with a lot of really pretty maps, and it runs like a dream on my 7 year old partially destroyed, definitely haunted PC.)

Here’s a replay I pulled from the game of me finishing off the other team in TAKEDOWN, which is kind of like the no-respawn Counter Strike style modes in Call of Duty, but with a variable respawn time that ticks up the more you get killed. I don’t think this clip is too impressive but

1) it looks like I accidentally deleted the other replays I had.

2) this felt incredible to do, even if it is really sloppy and the other team was really really bad.

3) I forgot to capture the kill I had where I put portals on the side and top of a cube and a guy confusedly walked into one end, popped out the top, and I blasted him with a plasma launcher.

10/10 video game, Splitgate is cool.

Games of the Year - 2019

I’m sitting down to write the final “official” version of this list on Monday, December 30th, when I think it’s finally safe to say that I’m not going to play and finish any more games in this, the Year of Our Lord 2019. I might come back to this intro part later and try to preface it with stuff, but for now I’m just going to jump right into it!

9 - Spyro Reignited Trilogy: Spyro the Dragon

At some point in the year 2000 I went to Toys R Us with my grandpa and cousins and convinced them that we needed to buy a PlayStation 2 (with copies of Crash Bandicoot 3 and Tomba 2) instead of a Dreamcast because it was “the most advanced thing ever.” Papa’s plan to get my cousins to spend time at his house with the PlayStation did not pan out, and I never got to finish Crash 3. Years later, I did end up with the pile of PlayStation 1 games we bought that afternoon, so I impulse purchased a busted original model PlayStation and a copy of Spyro 1 from a now defunct comic book shop 5 minutes from my cousins’ house. (RIP Epikos - it’s actually probably good that you got replaced by a frozen yogurt place, or I’d be drowning in bad Batman comics.) That game was fun to play, but it was mega old and definitely showed its age. Finally, back in July, this problem was solved when remakes of all 3 PlayStation Spyro games came to the Switch. I’ve only played the first one right now and have almost 100% completed it, but I’m ready to say that it’s the best collectathon I’ve ever played. It’s a good, chill, low-risk time with all these little bite size levels to glide around in with podcasts in the background. The flight levels are just difficult enough to be exciting, and the third world - the ice one - was a perfect handful of platforming levels. Good game!

8 - SNES on Switch

Alright this one is definitely going to be shorter - it took Nintendo way too long to do this, and Donkey Kong Country 2 isn’t even in this thing yet. The world is cruel, but Mario World and Yoshi’s Island are both still incredible games. Eventually I will finish Super Metroid, and eventually, the good version of Wario’s Woods (the SNES one) will be on the Switch. Until then I will continue to play Kirby Superstar and the first 10 minutes of Star Fox 2.

7 - A Short Hike

Thinking about it now, this one kind of feels like Spyro? Good chill out game with good music and a fun gliding mechanic. The low-fi GameBoy look is really cool, the dialogue is really cute and fun, and it feels like an inspirational exploration platformer with the climbing from Breath of the Wild and the vibe and look of an Animal Crossing. Also, the sunhat you buy from the craft lady on the island is incredible. More sunhats in games in 2020!

6 - Myst/Riven

Near the end of 2018 I briefly dated a girl who was into the same dorky stuff I am. On one of our dates she mentioned that one of her favorite games was Riven (the sequel to Myst), and she had beaten it like a dozen times. I had not beaten Riven even once because it was too hard. When we stopped dating, I decided to deal with it by beating Riven, not to prove that I could too, but uh, because of some other completely unrelated reason that had nothing to do with me feeling bad for myself. For the month of January, I fell into what I have since dubbed “the puzzle hole.” I created a notebook of incomprehensible diagrams, maps, and scribbles, and when my friend Ryan came to visit me, he said he found me hunched over my computer, mumbling to myself with a wild look in my eyes. I think I genuinely scared him when I tried to explain how I’d decoded the game’s number system. Anyways, Riven is a really good game that goes in a completely different direction from its predecessor, Myst (which I sped through as a refresher right after I finished Riven). While Myst was basically a password protected PowerPoint presentation with clunky puzzles and cutting edge 90s computer generated graphics, Riven feels like a living, breathing world. It’s not really a game of puzzles in the way that Myst is (honestly, I think there’s only like one actual flat-out puzzle), it’s a game of learning how to navigate a place and its history. Additionally, I think this game still looks great, mostly because of its inspired, grandiose, “prehistory steampunk plus the medieval Catholic church” art direction. This game was like 6 discs when it came out in the 90s? It’s gorgeous and I love to look at it so much that I’ve got the Ghen shrine as my phone background. The last bit of this game has some sort of animal puzzle that’s actually pretty terrible and almost gave me an aneurysm, but the end itself made me get genuinely teary-eyed in a way we’ll revisit later. Here’s a quote from the epilogue to chew on until then:

“And now, I am at rest, understanding that in Books, and Ages, and life… the ending can never truly be written.”

5 - Sayonara Wild Hearts

Speaking of games that made me teary-eyed, Sayonara Wild Hearts is a magical playable animated music video for an Icelandic electric-neon-pop concept album about getting dumped so hard it breaks the universe. This game owns, not necessarily because of the game part, which I think is just passable, but because of the sheer spectacle of it all. Each track gives you just enough interaction to keep engaged in the ups and downs and side-to-sides as stuff on screen spins and flips and explodes into prismatic crystalline representations of realizing that maybe learning to love yourself is the first step to being able to love and be loved again. The vocal tracks are the standouts here, and the finale is just amazing. Watching the heroine get stripped of all her powers but the longboard she rode in on, and then using that to skate in and around each of the tarotic manifestations of each of her flaws and shortcomings - mmf. GOOD GAME.

4 - CONTROL

I haven’t finished CONTROL yet, but I have so enjoyed my time with it. The story is starting to lose me a little, but I can’t stop thinking about this game’s world and the things that populate it, and I know I’m not alone. Maybe it’s something about the completely broken post-truth internet conspiracy theory mood of the past couple years, but exploring the pitch of “What if the headquarters of a secret paranormal federal government bureau got possessed?” with incredibly tight 3rd person shooter action and really really good superpowers just hits in a way that feels fresh and exciting almost in opposition to a AAA space dominated by sequels. Everything in this game is a delight; flying up and over giant angular slabs of brutalist concrete architecture, flinging forklifts into walls, reading a bunch of supplemental documents about a haunted refrigerator - I love this game. In fact, I love this game so much that I upgraded my Xbox One S to an Xbox One X (what a naming scheme) to deal with CONTROL’s terrible console performance and load times at launch. Even though the bosses in this game are awful and the checkpoints are not great, everything else in it (especially those big fonts) is so good. I’m gonna finish this game soon, and then I’m gonna trick some of you into playing Anomaly with me, because that game seems extremely cool.

3 - Dicey Dungeons

What if a deck building game was a rainbow cartoon gameshow that let you throw a triple charged spike boomerang into a pile of slime before transforming into a bear? I will never understand Magic: The Gathering, but I will never forget accidentally not dumping my last roll into the vampire killer stake and then getting merc’d by Dracula. The stat effects in this game ALONE are a joy, and that’s saying something about stat effects! They usually suck! This game is just so well-designed, it’s a pick-up-and play readability miracle, with so much variation and depth, where each run is a new adventure. I love it. I love it! Also the music slaps and the art is so dang good. Oh my word, Dicey Dungeons.

2 - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare [2019] (Multiplayer Only)

First of all, yes, I have only played the multiplayer mode in this game. I’ve heard almost no good things about the co-op spec-ops mode, and although I might get around to the campaign eventually, it is nowhere near even the middle of my to-play list. So - bearing in mind that I haven’t even touched 2 of the 3 modes of this game, it feels kind of wild that the Modern Warfare reboot is my second favorite game of this year. I wrote briefly about how much fun I was having with it right after launch, and that fun has only continued to grow since then. Growing up, the closest I got to owning a Call of Duty game was the Wii version of Goldeneye (which honestly had some pretty good maps), but I spent a couple of early high school sleepovers playing splitscreen Modern Warfare 1 or 2 and Black Ops at friends’ houses. Aside from the agonizing time spent watching some friends slowly and meticulously build loadouts (I’m looking at you Gabi Garcia), I have really good memories of those games. When I bought an Xbox in late 2015, I picked up Black Ops III to play with a couple friends, and enjoyed it for a bit, but couldn’t recapture that magic, and spent most of my time going 0 and 20 in that weird future version of NukeTown. In the lead-up to this game, there was a lot of talk on gaming podcasts about how serious and groundbreaking the campaign was going to be, and that seemed kind of interesting, and I started thinking, “Well, I’ve got a pile of GameStop gift cards that I gotta use before that place goes under…” so I rolled the dice and pre-ordered it. When the game finally came out, I was working late nights prepping for an audit at work, and absolutely did not want anything to do with a stressful, morally grey action movie campaign, so I begrudgingly decided to dip my toes into the multiplayer, and was hooked. After two years of trudging through slower, more methodical battle royale games where I always felt like I was dragging my team down, Modern Warfare’s lightweight, consequence-free, frenetic deathmatches felt like a breath of fresh air. Honestly, in terms of enjoyment, the fact that I can kind of hold my own in Kill Confirmed and Domination comes second to just how good it feels to play that game. Every weapon feels slick and sharp and solid and immediately easy to grasp, which again, refreshing in comparison to a game like Fortnite, where none of the guns never felt quite heavy(?) enough, and I could never keep track of which one was currently on top of the meta. Honestly, nothing against that game, I think the way it constantly shifts and transforms to stay fresh is amazing, and I’ve had a ton of fun playing it, but I think my time with Fortnite has drawn to a close, and that’s ok - because the crossplay revolution that it ushered in continues with Modern Warfare. Even though online multiplayer “walled gardens” are (and always have been) completely arbitrary, there is something magical about how easy it is to jump into lobbies with PC, PlayStation, and Xbox friends all at the same time. Now that I’m kind of out in Tennessee by myself, video games have been essential to me keeping up with some of my friends on both coasts, and it’s honestly a relief to be able to do it with a game that I absolutely love on in the background. That this game makes it so easy for me to continue to cultivate lifelong friendships might be why I’ve got it at spot number 2 - but also, Shoot House is an incredible map, and a few weeks ago they ran a mode called Cranked where you got faster every time you killed someone and then your heart exploded after 30 seconds! Perfect video game.

1 - Outer Wilds

When I went to go see Inside Out with Carter Ware a few summers ago, I jokingly told him that if he cried, I would not drive him home. 90 minutes later, the two of us were sobbing, and something inside me broke. Since then, almost anything even slightly emotional will make me cry. Sad banjo music while walking through the tunnel under the Atlanta airport? A single solitary tear rolls down my cheek. A warm starry night sitting next to my friends around a campfire? My eyes are watery and blurry as I hold back tears with a really funny looking frowny face. That one Apple Music commercial with the airpods and the dancing? I am a snotty mess. I say all of that to explain my earlier mentioned reactions to Riven and Sayonara Wild Hearts, and to preface me saying that the ending of Outer Wilds made me weep in an entirely new way. I’ll get to the how and the why of that reaction a little later (because it is kind of spoiler-y), and start with my explanation of why I love this game, my pitch on why you should play it, and my argument that this game is the true successor to Riven.

In Outer Wilds, you play as an alien from the small, woodsy, Pacific Northwest planet of Timber Hearth. You are the newest astronaut of the Outer Wilds, the planet’s Sierras Club-esque team of space explorers - currently spread out throughout the solar system, each equipped with a handmade instrument, all playing different parts of the same song from back on Timber Hearth. You wake up by a campfire, with your friend roasting marshmallows, reminding you that today is finally the day that you’ll make your first trip to space. You make your way around the town as folksy banjo music plays, talking to the 10 or 12 other people who live there - all of them excited for you, all of them rooting for you to make the planet of Timber Hearth proud with whatever it is you discover. As you make your way to the observatory tower to pick up the launch codes for the shuttle, a newly discovered relic from a precursor civilization - a statue - opens its eyes and links itself to you. Everyone is confused, but they wish you a safe trip, and watch as you take off. Minutes later, you die as the sun goes supernova.

And then, you’re back at the campfire, waking up to your friend roasting marshmallows and everyone wishing you a safe trip. Somehow, you’ve been caught in a time loop by that statue, and it’s up to you to take the tools that you’ve been given - a jetpack, a camera drone, a radio, and a brand new translator tool for deciphering writing from those precursors, the Nomai - and explore the completely simulated 5 planet solar system. You fly around in your tiny spaceship, making your way to each of the planets, talking to the astronauts about points of interest, exploring Nomai ruins, and playing around with the natural phenomena and bits of abandoned technology that you find there. A mix of folksy music and synths accompany your journey as you do everything you can to solve the mystery of the time loop and the supernova. Every 22 minutes (or sooner if you die) the sun will explode, and you’ll be back on Timber Hearth, ready to go again. Each time you learn something new, it will be added to your ship’s computer - which functions as a sort of red yarn and thumbtacks rumor board. And honestly, that’s about it - Outer Wilds is kind of weird as a video game, because there’s no powers to unlock, no upgrades to purchase, no additional wrinkles that get added after a couple hours of gameplay. Much like Riven, this is a game of places and histories. Everything is open to you from the start, and the only thing that changes as you play is what you know - about the solar system, about the Nomai, about the loop, and about the supernova that always ends each 22 minute loop.

Time loops aren’t a new thing in video games, but in every other looping game I’ve played, they come with a sense of dread and urgency - they’re a hassle, and for the most part they don’t add to the experience in any way other than acting as a powerful narrative framing. Not the case in Outer Wilds, where instead of feeling limiting, the time loop feels freeing - giving you a way to experiment without fear of failure. There will always be another loop, so you can try to land on that busted space station, or fly into that black hole, or see what happens if you try to skip your ship around the sun’s powerful fiery orbit. This does mean that the opening of the game can be a bit aimless, but a little poking reveals dozens of threads to pull at and follow, all of them the perfect length to be focused in on and tackled in a single loop. My game of the year in 2018 was Return of the Obra Dinn, because it made me feel like a detective. In much the same way, Outer Wilds made me feel like an explorer. It got its hooks in me in a way that only a few games ever have. And up until I finished it on Saturday night, I thought that was going to be the end of the story for Outer Wilds - just another game on a list of games that I loved and then forgot about. Wow was I wrong.

How do we wrap our heads around the ultimate shape and size and impact of our place in the world? Can we? In either the second or the third Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book, one of the characters, Zaphod, gets put inside something called the “Total Perspective Vortex,” which is designed to zoom out, and give the person inside a true sense of how miniscule their place in the universe actually is, driving them insane. Of course, the thing backfires, and Zaphod instead concludes that this thing has shown him what he always knew - that he is the center of the universe. In a completely un-narcissistic way, I’ve always kind of related to this bit, because try as I might, I can’t grasp that sense of my own spatial or temporal smallness when I look up into the stars, and that has always made me feel bad. Video games feel kind of like the worst version of this thing that feels like a sin, because the worlds of games almost always do just revolve around you in a way that’s rarely acknowledged, and is pretty much never critiqued. I think that’s why it feels so crazy that Outer Wilds decides to just swing for the fences and tell a story that is ultimately about the briefness of human experience in the face of time on the cosmic scale. Even crazier is that it manages to do so without falling into hopelessness or nihilism. This is a game about coming to terms with inevitability, but not being defeated by it. Outer Wilds feels like something special that can only come out of the kind of crummy circumstances we’re living in right now, and it begs to be experienced - if Riven posits that the ending might not be written, Outer Wilds instead states that it actually for sure is, but still demands that we write our own stories in the interim.

So, as the year (and the decade) draw to a close, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. That’s it for now, I’m so glad I finally sat down and wrote this, so until whatever comes next, stay safe, and keep finding stories to experience and enjoy.

Matt Out!

a film that captures the feeling of a disoriented Sunday brunch midway through a long weekend

Ok, where do I start? Going into “Under the Silver Lake,” I was convinced that this movie was going to be bad, because it got delayed like four times and pushed almost a year and a half out from its original release date. (Something similar happened and continues to happen to “New Mutants,” and I don’t think that movie is ever going to see the light of day.) Mostly due to that fear of badness, I had this one on my watchlist for a long time, but had held off on watching it because of those bad vibes, but also because I wanted to rewatch “It Follows” first (I did - that movie owns and everyone who tried to convince me otherwise was wrong) and I needed to have like a good long uninterrupted afternoon because this film is like three hours long.

Last weekend, the stars aligned - my couch got delivered, a date cancelled on me, and I had a long, lazy Sunday stretching out ahead of me with the laundry already done. Right out of the gate I wanna say - this movie was the perfect way to spend that time. I don’t know if I have a lot of interesting things to say about it, but I really enjoyed every piece of it, and I think it delivered on what I’d hoped for (and had not gotten) from “Me, Him, Her,” which was pitched as a “oh wow LA is dark and whacky and craaaazy” movie, but really just ended up being a sweet but kinda empty rehash of “Chasing Amy.” (Also, Max Landis ended up being an actual full on rapist, and wow, that super sucks and I’m still dealing with how into that dude I got for a few years there. Yikes.)

So anyways…

“Under The Silver Lake” follows Sam (Andrew Garfield) as he criss-crosses LA and all its various crowds (hipsters, punks, weirdos, losers, the homeless and the uber-wealthy) trying to find a missing girl caught up in a twisty-tangle-y ever-complicating conspiracy full of subliminal messages, cults of personality, murderers from urban legends, treasure maps, and a tunnel system that runs underneath the heart of LA.

Ok, digging in a bit - I think “Under the Silver Lake” also delivers on its premise way better than “It Follows” did. That movie has a great set up, it’s incredible to look at, it has a really well executed mood, it’s super spooky, the score is fantastic, the climax is maybe my favorite in a horror movie, but somehow, those pieces don’t feel like they add up. The middle of that movie (not the sequential middle, but like the core?) feels a little empty, and although there is a sense of urgency baked into that movie, it’s kind of a slow unfocused urgency, because that’s all you really need to outrun that monster.

“Silver Lake” on the other hand almost makes the unfocused-ness the point? There is a central mystery propelling the film forward from start to finish, but the best and most interesting parts happen all along the way as Sam’s journey sprawls out into all the different neighborhoods that make up LA. Not everything that happens matters, but all of it is interesting to watch. Speaking of, I loved watching this movie - the way it looks and sounds and feels - it’s just a good piece of work to get completely absorbed into, which I think is because of the slow kind of meandering pace. It’s kind of like - ok, bear with me - kind of like:

Andrew Garfield plays chess with Topher Grace at this big garden party brunch in one scene, and it just radiates that vibe of oversleeping on a Sunday and then getting dragged out to something with your buddies but still feeling kind of disoriented and warm, with the sun shining in your eyes and the blue of the sky is almost somehow just a bit too blue, and you think, that’s weird, but actually, maybe this is how everything is always supposed to look and I just haven’t been sleeping enough since, well, maybe since that one night my junior year of high school when I had to stay up and finish that history paper, and you stand there for a second and blink and everything is simultaneously moving in realtime and dreamtime in kind of the same way that the good episodes of “Twin Peaks” were?

Actually, that’s probably the best comparison honestly - each new piece of information is not necessarily a new clue, but rather another interesting angle to view the whole big crystalline mess from.  

I have completely lost the plot at this point (which feels appropriate) so I’ll stop here and close by saying I liked this movie in both the overall and moment-to-moment sense. On top of that, I think its “message moments” all hit like gut punches, and really tied the whole sprawling odyssey together. So, if anything I’ve rambled about up to this point has been mildly entertaining for you, check out “Under the Silver Lake” ASAP.

Matt out.